Ariadne Conill 🐰
IQ and other psychometric assessments are not actually backed by hard science but vibes
so when someone brags about having a "genius level IQ", just write them off as a narcissist
sincerely, your local psychologist turned software engineer
✧✦Catherine✦✧@ariadne what does a psychologist say about narcissism anyway
i've seen probably every possible take on the internet by now
@whitequark its complicated, I think in a lot of situations narcissistic behavior develops out of self loathing and the discovery that they can self soothe through maladaptive behavior
@ariadne that's useful and reasonable but i was thinking about something different
i think in practice i've mostly seen "narcissist" be used as an insult and as a leverage in an attack. this made it really hard historically to figure out how, if at all, one can make good conclusions about that type of behavior and its observations
@ariadne if someone tells me "X is a narcissist" I don't have any tools to find out if there's truth to it or they just really don't like X
asie@whitequark @ariadne
i think it's pretty hard for an unqualified person to conclusively diagnose someone from a distance; harder, even, than self-diagnosis.
flip side: is there a meaningful difference between "narcissist" and "unlikable/best to avoid, but in a non-narcissistic way" in day to day social life?
i think it's pretty hard for an unqualified person to conclusively diagnose someone from a distance; harder, even, than self-diagnosis.
flip side: is there a meaningful difference between "narcissist" and "unlikable/best to avoid, but in a non-narcissistic way" in day to day social life?
princess pancake 
@asie @whitequark @ariadne Doesn't that, in a way, make it a vibes-based personality assessment? Narcissistic traits are pretty common and many people work on theirs, so yeah I'd argue it's in practice a synonym for a "bad person"