So, Trump has "grandiose delusion" which led him to the possibility to be the most powerful person on the planet (against ALL odds, since he didn't climb up the ladder by typical corrupted way as Hillary Clinton and Biden did)? Maybe it's not a delusion and whoever diagnosed him with this has delusions? Come on, even libtards cannot come with such a simplistic explanation.
I get it, you believe there are certain traits that sometimes are positive but more than often lead to destructive behavior, but I'll tell you this:
People (especially when they are young) believe in something more for them. Sometimes that they will be kings of queens; sometimes that they will be rich, or famous, or find the perfect mate. It's called dreaming. Dreaming (or rather the level of it) is probably a trait like the one you just described. But it has nothing to do with the success of a person. On the contrary, more than often successful people have tuned down this trait.
As far as Trump is regarded, there aren't many people like him in our times in order to make a good statistics, but there are PLENTY of jealous siblings and abundance of money, power and malign willpower in the Leftist circles to try to exploit those siblings. Narcissism is needed for his job.
Since the end of the Cold War, the general public have increasingly been driven crazy by sermonising liberals and leftists.
Whose arrogant self-righteousness has now encountered its Nemesis in the person of Donald J. Trump - a man as impervious to sermonising as any human being can be; a major reason for his popularity.
Evil spirits exist. Reading about the mad or bad people dealt with in the article is clear evidence of that.
One of those people makes a telling reference to Loki, the Trickster, an evil spirit if ever there was one.
And much admired in our demonically-possessed society, full as it is of tricksters living by their wits. A society as doomed as that of the Norse gods, which Loki destroyed.
Thank you! Evidently, these ideas are out there. Still, I'm a bit surprised over how many different ways there are to make up theories of human evolution. Copied from the paper:
"As a first step towards grounding psychopathology in ancestral social structure, we propose a minimum plausible prevalence, given likely ancestral group sizes, for negatively frequency-dependent phenotypes to be maintained as specialised tails of adaptive distributions – below the calculated prevalence, specialisation is highly unlikely. For instance, chronic highly debilitating forms of autism or schizophrenia are too rare for such explanations, whereas attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder and broad autism phenotypes are common enough to have existed in most hunter-gatherer bands, making adaptive explanations more plausible."
I really don't get this line of reasoning. Wasn't the psychology of Genghis Khan adaptive, because he was too unusual for there to be one of him in every hunter-gatherer band? In my point of view, what was adaptive was adaptive, regardless of how uncommon it was. The probability for something to be adaptive indeed increases the more common it is. Still, I can't see why it would be useful to exclude the possibility that uncommon traits can be adaptive.
Edit: If nothing else, uncommon traits might have been exactly what made one band capable of winning at the expense of other bands. The reflexive denial of the relevance of the uncommon might be a symptom of a reflexive denial of group-level evolution.
Unfortunately it can. I agree diversity, or at least, variety of entertainment, is critical, but some of that diversity may be just getting a free ride, not necessarily all being exampled as fatal parasites (slow predation) but many will be less than benign and not helping with the healthy variety or mixture that is the work of the world we self.
This is still too stuck in the silo of psychology, merely mapping diversity with 'here be monsters' without leads on other frameworks is usually suboptimal. (Big history is a type of more-than-psychology framework).
"I could offer apart from publicly making a complete nincompoop out of myself. The only other option would be to remain on the periphery and to not say a single word' The social urge is strong in this one, "I must enter the fray" even if there is no fray.
I'd re-diagnose this in a worlding-ology as bad worlding with self-demands in a compulsive contusion of self into others (as even the selfing "knows thyeself"). (I've met these kids with this diagnosis BTW -- grandmum a narcissist, mother a histrionic survivor -- neither genotype nor phenotype is pure here so what is selected for, what is actually the genetic loading?)
" pathologically selfish men who managed to stay alive were important men." You mean baboons, important baboons. But the primate hierarchy for Homo sp. was a very long time ago. We are still working on it. That is a worlding project where we are seeing incomplete or evolutionary 'success'.
"I no longer believe that any special environmental influences are needed in order to develop a delusional personality disorder" I've never believed it.
"because once in a while, they actually make people powerful and evolutionarily successful." Because we actively do not regulate them with a name, our social learning does not maintain a category for them that gives us a handle on them which cannot be used by 'them' against us (terms like evil, etc)
They just say stuff and by a process of iteration discover which has more functionality in the environment they have access to, if that environment's social learning matrix has no way to counter them then statistically some will (scum also rises) have a career more than the rest of us less deluded people. While the lack of fear and reality principle is key, it is our failure to regulate them that is their opportunity, just saying they represent a parasitic success story and leaving it there without a consideration of the evolution of history that becomes the human story, ignores what we Homo sp. have done to arises out of baboon hierarchies.
Whether they are recidivists or new parasites since agriculture arose and inter-group competition lost its selective edge for a while on individual behaviours (their appearance in our variety of life is then a sign of our success as innovators), I do not know, but that big history means most of us are not like than, and their existence is better framed/explained by our success and not their diagnostic specialness.
If altruism/cooperation is the dominant/effective strategy in intergroup clashes, and egoism/selfishness is the effective strategy in within-group transactions, what's the effective/dominant strategy within groups in nonbelligerent competition, e.g. economic or technological?
I have always been suspicious, long before I even started studying psychology, of the environmentalist theories of psychopathology and to the extent that the environment plays a role, it isn't causal otherwise we'd see more outcome consistency across similar environments. Rather, what we see are numerous instances of only a few subset of people being affected by an adverse environmental system or we see a completely benign and even nurturing environment producing one anomalous case of behavioral and mental disturbances (e.g. Alma). The position you've come to hold, that some people are just naturally predisposed to pathological deviation, is the only position that stands the test of multiple explanations across multiple context and cases. It also allows for a dimensional construction of psychopathology since everything natural is almost always distributed.
I was eagerly waiting to read something about Pathological Demand Avoidance being similar to or being a version of ADHD. They sound awfully similar in traits and symptomatic expressions. Harry, if taken to see a psychiatrist as a child, would most likely have been diagnosed as a case of ADHD.
>>If altruism/cooperation is the dominant/effective strategy in intergroup clashes, and egoism/selfishness is the effective strategy in within-group transactions, what's the effective/dominant strategy within groups in nonbelligerent competition, e.g. economic or technological?
In my point of view, non-belligent competition is a social tool to mimic intergroup competition. Some societies have evolved ways to take out the good aspects of intergroup competition without most of the destructive aspects. Such systems are great when they work, but they are always under threat from egoistic individuals ready to corrupt them for their own purposes.
>>I was eagerly waiting to read something about Pathological Demand Avoidance being similar to or being a version of ADHD.
Harry was diagnosed with ADHD at 12. And with autism a couple of years later. But I would say that the similarities with ADHD come to an important degree because people with PDA are misdiagnosed with ADHD. ADHD people are supposed to be inattentive and impulsive and nothing more. Their concept of reality is supposed to be fine. So when they look back at what they did on impulse they regret it and lament that they act before they think.
Harry's main problem is not impulsivity but a throroughly self-centered world view (I will return to that later). Even at age 23, when he wrote his memoir, he largely endorses the self-centeredness he exhibited as a child and writes extremely little about the thoughts and feelings of other people (as if he never imagines them). So I think he was one of the misdiagnosed cases: Everybody hoped he wasn't that way for real, but only acted on impulse. The sad truth was what he described in the quotation about his inner Loki: That his self-centered lifestyle was the only way of being the he could ever imagine.
When Alma was 8-9 years old, I really hoped that she had ADHD, because that would explain her antisocial behavior without her having a distorted view of reality. But a psychologist subjected her to some attention-test and found out that her attention was fine. So I couldn't hope for that for very long. I then hoped that she had different kinds of social disabilities before I had to realize that she actually does have a distorted world view where other people play very marginal roles. People, including myself, try every other explanation before they enter that one.
I agree with you, I know people with ADHD, and while their mind might wonder and they really prefer to do work, academics and hobbies they are intrinsically motivated to do, most are respectful and outwardly pro-social/ don't cause "scenes".
I think it would be interesting to consider how one can be both delusional, and irrational, at the same time.
Trump's delusions (and Musk, and Jobs, and [Insert improbably successful person here]) can occasionally produce great results, but the vast majority of the time, they lead to taking too big of a bet, and ending up destitute. I don't know too much about Trump's rise to power, but for Musk, he took multiple extremely risk bets, way in excess of what could be considered reasonable at the time, and only reached stability with any of his companies by the skin of his teeth.
For some of us, I think the value is in understanding how we can be selective delusional, while still preserving enough practicality and rationality to protect ourselves from truly no-win and terribly negative-EV bets. People talking about Steve Job's "reality distortion field" where a person can quite literally make those around them believe in what seems counter to what is rationally possible, and this can produce extremely impressive results. The benefit of being delusional seems to require actually believing in it, so I often think of how one can have this double-think, where they are delusional about certain things, in order to distort reality around them to their benefit, while also being practical enough to take the right bets, without losing a true belief in one's own delusion.
Maybe trigger-based delusion? Like how a method actor can trigger something in their heads that makes them embody the character they are playing? To think like a delusional person, to act like one, and to actually embody the character that is a more delusional version of yourself? I don't know if this would actually work, or if it would be an empty-belief or not, but how I see method acting described, it seems like actors really embody the thoughts and mannerisms of the character they are playing, not just the external portrayal.
Grifters just say stuff. No risk involved, they pay close attention to expectations and outcomes of their words. They grift by surfing the subsidies the rest of us put forward by way of accommodation. Musk's start was really getting some go away money out of paypal, in an agreement in which he made them 'let him' say he was a founder of paypal. They said sure, now go away. He then was able to grift with wealth behind him and steal other inventions on their way to being innovated across the economy and society. Generally we are not clear onthe difference between invention and innovation and grifters exploit those slack social categories or 'ontologies'.
Maybe some semi-irrational delusionality is much more widespread in society. As I understand it, many economists and psychologists agree that starting start-ups is generally a pretty delusional thing to do, as most of them fail, but we must support them anyway 'cause in the grand scheme of things they make us all wealthier.
Oh for sure! I think a reason so many startups fail is because of irrational delusional thinking, and if you're considering starting a startup, you don't want to be in the majority that fail. The trick is to harness the power of delusional thinking for the reality distortion field, without spending your time and resources down a route where rational thinking would suggest a better alternative.
decades ago I did small scale and more not-for-profit, what are nowcalled start-ups in social entrpreneurship, I don't think delusions are necessary, but I understand the frame. Some are still going: https://resourcetipshop.com/
Remember if you say something and people jump, you do not need to be deluded about something to say it, or clear eyed, even if your flying monkeys are deluded by you. It is more complex than mere delusions. Labelling the urge or skill to say something and make people jump as a required skill, when really the rest of us are accommodating it, and then labelling it all as delusions and removing the agency from our accommodations and giving it to the "deluder" is an example of bad worlding, I think it is a moral error.
So, Trump has "grandiose delusion" which led him to the possibility to be the most powerful person on the planet (against ALL odds, since he didn't climb up the ladder by typical corrupted way as Hillary Clinton and Biden did)? Maybe it's not a delusion and whoever diagnosed him with this has delusions? Come on, even libtards cannot come with such a simplistic explanation.
I get it, you believe there are certain traits that sometimes are positive but more than often lead to destructive behavior, but I'll tell you this:
People (especially when they are young) believe in something more for them. Sometimes that they will be kings of queens; sometimes that they will be rich, or famous, or find the perfect mate. It's called dreaming. Dreaming (or rather the level of it) is probably a trait like the one you just described. But it has nothing to do with the success of a person. On the contrary, more than often successful people have tuned down this trait.
As far as Trump is regarded, there aren't many people like him in our times in order to make a good statistics, but there are PLENTY of jealous siblings and abundance of money, power and malign willpower in the Leftist circles to try to exploit those siblings. Narcissism is needed for his job.
Binge- reading
Since the end of the Cold War, the general public have increasingly been driven crazy by sermonising liberals and leftists.
Whose arrogant self-righteousness has now encountered its Nemesis in the person of Donald J. Trump - a man as impervious to sermonising as any human being can be; a major reason for his popularity.
Evil spirits exist. Reading about the mad or bad people dealt with in the article is clear evidence of that.
One of those people makes a telling reference to Loki, the Trickster, an evil spirit if ever there was one.
And much admired in our demonically-possessed society, full as it is of tricksters living by their wits. A society as doomed as that of the Norse gods, which Loki destroyed.
Can one be described as "successful" if in the process, one has become very evil or very delusional ?
Are cruel or delusional people to be envied, as long as their skill and/or luck has won them money/prestige/sexual pleasure ?
Regardless whether this essay is true or not, this is one of the smartest and well written essays I have ever read.
I just lost 'The Game' for the second time in two weeks. Quite a losing streak for the mid-20s, dang.
This paper goes into many of the evolutionary dynamics for causing 'specialised minds', might be of interest https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/evolutionary-human-sciences/article/specialised-minds-extending-adaptive-explanations-of-personality-to-the-evolution-of-psychopathology/EA63787E64435787ADEF5A0AC882593A
Thank you! Evidently, these ideas are out there. Still, I'm a bit surprised over how many different ways there are to make up theories of human evolution. Copied from the paper:
"As a first step towards grounding psychopathology in ancestral social structure, we propose a minimum plausible prevalence, given likely ancestral group sizes, for negatively frequency-dependent phenotypes to be maintained as specialised tails of adaptive distributions – below the calculated prevalence, specialisation is highly unlikely. For instance, chronic highly debilitating forms of autism or schizophrenia are too rare for such explanations, whereas attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder and broad autism phenotypes are common enough to have existed in most hunter-gatherer bands, making adaptive explanations more plausible."
I really don't get this line of reasoning. Wasn't the psychology of Genghis Khan adaptive, because he was too unusual for there to be one of him in every hunter-gatherer band? In my point of view, what was adaptive was adaptive, regardless of how uncommon it was. The probability for something to be adaptive indeed increases the more common it is. Still, I can't see why it would be useful to exclude the possibility that uncommon traits can be adaptive.
Edit: If nothing else, uncommon traits might have been exactly what made one band capable of winning at the expense of other bands. The reflexive denial of the relevance of the uncommon might be a symptom of a reflexive denial of group-level evolution.
Oooh some anthropology! Hooray!!.
"That is a bit too much to be an accident."
Unfortunately it can. I agree diversity, or at least, variety of entertainment, is critical, but some of that diversity may be just getting a free ride, not necessarily all being exampled as fatal parasites (slow predation) but many will be less than benign and not helping with the healthy variety or mixture that is the work of the world we self.
This is still too stuck in the silo of psychology, merely mapping diversity with 'here be monsters' without leads on other frameworks is usually suboptimal. (Big history is a type of more-than-psychology framework).
"I could offer apart from publicly making a complete nincompoop out of myself. The only other option would be to remain on the periphery and to not say a single word' The social urge is strong in this one, "I must enter the fray" even if there is no fray.
I'd re-diagnose this in a worlding-ology as bad worlding with self-demands in a compulsive contusion of self into others (as even the selfing "knows thyeself"). (I've met these kids with this diagnosis BTW -- grandmum a narcissist, mother a histrionic survivor -- neither genotype nor phenotype is pure here so what is selected for, what is actually the genetic loading?)
" pathologically selfish men who managed to stay alive were important men." You mean baboons, important baboons. But the primate hierarchy for Homo sp. was a very long time ago. We are still working on it. That is a worlding project where we are seeing incomplete or evolutionary 'success'.
"I no longer believe that any special environmental influences are needed in order to develop a delusional personality disorder" I've never believed it.
"because once in a while, they actually make people powerful and evolutionarily successful." Because we actively do not regulate them with a name, our social learning does not maintain a category for them that gives us a handle on them which cannot be used by 'them' against us (terms like evil, etc)
They just say stuff and by a process of iteration discover which has more functionality in the environment they have access to, if that environment's social learning matrix has no way to counter them then statistically some will (scum also rises) have a career more than the rest of us less deluded people. While the lack of fear and reality principle is key, it is our failure to regulate them that is their opportunity, just saying they represent a parasitic success story and leaving it there without a consideration of the evolution of history that becomes the human story, ignores what we Homo sp. have done to arises out of baboon hierarchies.
Whether they are recidivists or new parasites since agriculture arose and inter-group competition lost its selective edge for a while on individual behaviours (their appearance in our variety of life is then a sign of our success as innovators), I do not know, but that big history means most of us are not like than, and their existence is better framed/explained by our success and not their diagnostic specialness.
We need to take responsibility for our success.
Great stuff, I look forward to the next installment.
This was an engrossing read.
If altruism/cooperation is the dominant/effective strategy in intergroup clashes, and egoism/selfishness is the effective strategy in within-group transactions, what's the effective/dominant strategy within groups in nonbelligerent competition, e.g. economic or technological?
I have always been suspicious, long before I even started studying psychology, of the environmentalist theories of psychopathology and to the extent that the environment plays a role, it isn't causal otherwise we'd see more outcome consistency across similar environments. Rather, what we see are numerous instances of only a few subset of people being affected by an adverse environmental system or we see a completely benign and even nurturing environment producing one anomalous case of behavioral and mental disturbances (e.g. Alma). The position you've come to hold, that some people are just naturally predisposed to pathological deviation, is the only position that stands the test of multiple explanations across multiple context and cases. It also allows for a dimensional construction of psychopathology since everything natural is almost always distributed.
I was eagerly waiting to read something about Pathological Demand Avoidance being similar to or being a version of ADHD. They sound awfully similar in traits and symptomatic expressions. Harry, if taken to see a psychiatrist as a child, would most likely have been diagnosed as a case of ADHD.
>>If altruism/cooperation is the dominant/effective strategy in intergroup clashes, and egoism/selfishness is the effective strategy in within-group transactions, what's the effective/dominant strategy within groups in nonbelligerent competition, e.g. economic or technological?
In my point of view, non-belligent competition is a social tool to mimic intergroup competition. Some societies have evolved ways to take out the good aspects of intergroup competition without most of the destructive aspects. Such systems are great when they work, but they are always under threat from egoistic individuals ready to corrupt them for their own purposes.
>>I was eagerly waiting to read something about Pathological Demand Avoidance being similar to or being a version of ADHD.
Harry was diagnosed with ADHD at 12. And with autism a couple of years later. But I would say that the similarities with ADHD come to an important degree because people with PDA are misdiagnosed with ADHD. ADHD people are supposed to be inattentive and impulsive and nothing more. Their concept of reality is supposed to be fine. So when they look back at what they did on impulse they regret it and lament that they act before they think.
Harry's main problem is not impulsivity but a throroughly self-centered world view (I will return to that later). Even at age 23, when he wrote his memoir, he largely endorses the self-centeredness he exhibited as a child and writes extremely little about the thoughts and feelings of other people (as if he never imagines them). So I think he was one of the misdiagnosed cases: Everybody hoped he wasn't that way for real, but only acted on impulse. The sad truth was what he described in the quotation about his inner Loki: That his self-centered lifestyle was the only way of being the he could ever imagine.
When Alma was 8-9 years old, I really hoped that she had ADHD, because that would explain her antisocial behavior without her having a distorted view of reality. But a psychologist subjected her to some attention-test and found out that her attention was fine. So I couldn't hope for that for very long. I then hoped that she had different kinds of social disabilities before I had to realize that she actually does have a distorted world view where other people play very marginal roles. People, including myself, try every other explanation before they enter that one.
I agree with you, I know people with ADHD, and while their mind might wonder and they really prefer to do work, academics and hobbies they are intrinsically motivated to do, most are respectful and outwardly pro-social/ don't cause "scenes".
Great essay.
Thanks for another brilliant essay.
I think it would be interesting to consider how one can be both delusional, and irrational, at the same time.
Trump's delusions (and Musk, and Jobs, and [Insert improbably successful person here]) can occasionally produce great results, but the vast majority of the time, they lead to taking too big of a bet, and ending up destitute. I don't know too much about Trump's rise to power, but for Musk, he took multiple extremely risk bets, way in excess of what could be considered reasonable at the time, and only reached stability with any of his companies by the skin of his teeth.
For some of us, I think the value is in understanding how we can be selective delusional, while still preserving enough practicality and rationality to protect ourselves from truly no-win and terribly negative-EV bets. People talking about Steve Job's "reality distortion field" where a person can quite literally make those around them believe in what seems counter to what is rationally possible, and this can produce extremely impressive results. The benefit of being delusional seems to require actually believing in it, so I often think of how one can have this double-think, where they are delusional about certain things, in order to distort reality around them to their benefit, while also being practical enough to take the right bets, without losing a true belief in one's own delusion.
Maybe trigger-based delusion? Like how a method actor can trigger something in their heads that makes them embody the character they are playing? To think like a delusional person, to act like one, and to actually embody the character that is a more delusional version of yourself? I don't know if this would actually work, or if it would be an empty-belief or not, but how I see method acting described, it seems like actors really embody the thoughts and mannerisms of the character they are playing, not just the external portrayal.
Grifters just say stuff. No risk involved, they pay close attention to expectations and outcomes of their words. They grift by surfing the subsidies the rest of us put forward by way of accommodation. Musk's start was really getting some go away money out of paypal, in an agreement in which he made them 'let him' say he was a founder of paypal. They said sure, now go away. He then was able to grift with wealth behind him and steal other inventions on their way to being innovated across the economy and society. Generally we are not clear onthe difference between invention and innovation and grifters exploit those slack social categories or 'ontologies'.
Maybe some semi-irrational delusionality is much more widespread in society. As I understand it, many economists and psychologists agree that starting start-ups is generally a pretty delusional thing to do, as most of them fail, but we must support them anyway 'cause in the grand scheme of things they make us all wealthier.
Oh for sure! I think a reason so many startups fail is because of irrational delusional thinking, and if you're considering starting a startup, you don't want to be in the majority that fail. The trick is to harness the power of delusional thinking for the reality distortion field, without spending your time and resources down a route where rational thinking would suggest a better alternative.
decades ago I did small scale and more not-for-profit, what are nowcalled start-ups in social entrpreneurship, I don't think delusions are necessary, but I understand the frame. Some are still going: https://resourcetipshop.com/
Remember if you say something and people jump, you do not need to be deluded about something to say it, or clear eyed, even if your flying monkeys are deluded by you. It is more complex than mere delusions. Labelling the urge or skill to say something and make people jump as a required skill, when really the rest of us are accommodating it, and then labelling it all as delusions and removing the agency from our accommodations and giving it to the "deluder" is an example of bad worlding, I think it is a moral error.