The Dark Core of Personality
I don&#x27;t really want to call this pseudoscience, but what it&#x27;s missing is the connection to psychiatry and neuroscience and to me falls into the nasty tendency of bucket thinking. Just because traits are observable and nameable doesn&#x27;t mean they&#x27;re actually valid. You&#x27;re just handing amateurs dumb &quot;diagnostic&quot; tools that are just going to harm interpersonal relationships rather than make them better.<p>If I observe you as having narcissistic traits, and you observe yourself as having narcissistic traits, and you form an identity around being a narcissist, nothing meaningful has been done. You still have no useful tools with which to make your life better.<p>The psychological world needs a lot less of this, because handing people convenient identities without a corresponding plan of action for improving yourself that actually <i>works</i>, is contributing to rather than alleviating the problem.<p>I don&#x27;t think half of the people who think they&#x27;re on the autism spectrum are anywhere close to it. I don&#x27;t think half of the people described as narcissistic or psychopathic deserve the term. I do think that most people have emotional difficulties, and quantifying and providing resources for improving emotional health and depth should be the primary focus of psychology at the moment.<p>I like the focus on loneliness, I hate the focus on disorders.