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

@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
@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?

@whitequark @asie yes. narcisstic personality disorder has very specific diagnostic criteria.

the generalized version is antisocial personality disorder, which is largely a catch-all.

@ariadne @asie do you some good reading material on this that I could follow, just to see if I can get a more useful interpretation of events?