shrink comments on A Kick in the Rationals: What hurts you in your LessWrong Parts? - Less Wrong

24 Post author: sixes_and_sevens 25 April 2012 12:12PM

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Comment author: shrink 27 April 2012 07:26:27AM *  4 points [-]

Various cases of NPD online. The NPD-afflicted individuals usually are too arrogant to study or do anything difficult where they can measurably fail, and instead opt to blog on the topics where they don't know the fundamentals, promoting misinformed opinions. Some even live on donations for performing work that they never tried to study for doing. It's unclear what attracts normal people to such individuals, but I guess if you don't think yourself a supergenius you can still think yourself clever for following a genius whom you can detect without relying on such ordinary things as credentials or achievements, as described here.

Comment author: khafra 27 April 2012 02:40:53PM 8 points [-]

You know, an uncharitable reading of this would almost sort-of kinda maybe construe it as a rebuke of the LW community. Almost.

Comment author: shrink 28 April 2012 08:34:25AM *  2 points [-]

It's more a question of how charitably you read LW, maybe? The phenomenon I am speaking of is quite generic. About 1% of people are clinical narcissists (probably more), that's a lot of people, and the narcissists dedicate more resources to self promotion, and take on projects that no well calibrated person of same expertise would attempt, such as e.g. making a free energy generator without having studied physics or invented anything not so grandiose first.