> Regardless, these people tend to masquerade as "entrepreneurs", "researchers", "thinkers", "doers", or as "authors"

And activists.

when it is in a circle where the people know more or less who is who, its unlikely to happen any masquerading

sometimes there are misunderstandings and some in the circle may have the impression that there is some masquerading going on

sooner or later, I guess, things naturally clarify as time flows and the views are prettier

It is not a figment of my imagination: There were things going on besides multiple forms of outright plagiarism within several submissions. Because there are often multiple forms of plagiarism occurring in the same submission, once you catch it, it's pretty clear cut that it was deliberate. It is not only in writing but at actual conferences when she gives speeches.

The individual I mention is known to wear a custom "code t-shirt" of the program (aka "product") that she claims to be her original work, to conferences and meetups. The t-shirt along with the code itself has the /exact same specific variable names/ that I provided via email to a colleague years ago. She is also seen wearing this t-shirt in several media publications. She also publishes "research" based on this "work" in peer-reviewed journal articles. It really is quite disgusting.

I was not talking about your experience , by any means, sorry if you understood that I was aluding to your comment, its not the actual situation at all

I was comenting on the parent of my comment, not on your comment, and I was talking, clearly, in a general sense, in a quite specific situation that is absolutely different then your experience

I was also a victim of this. At my first engineering job, I came up with a novel way to handle project estimation for a very large company, using a combination of basic statistical techniques (hierarchical linear regression, markov chains). It replaced an existing terrible model by the resident PhD in statistics, which was doing a very simple 2 degree fitted curve.

Anyways, this person seemed to really dislike our team and what we had accomplished, and was constantly trying to road block us for a long time. Then out of the blue, he asked us to come and explain it to him. I thought he was reconciling, and we showed him all the details and spent a while so he could understand. We provided him the implementation as well. Then 3-4 weeks later, he quit to go work at Apple. It seemed like he'd stolen our work to improve his career.

About 15 years ago I worked on a command line shell that was adding a remoting feature which would allow you to execute a shell command on a remote machine. When the first cut of this came out, it seemed like it worked fine, but I decided to try it across a high latency connection - specifically setting up an inbound connection to the public internet and routing it from our office in the US to a proxy in Hong Kong and back. It performed about like a connection over a 300 baud modem. So I spent a weekend furiously creating a private build that reduced the number of handshakes and added streaming compression that ultimately increased the throughput by something like a factor of 20. On Monday I shared this work with the extended engineering team, and...crickets. I was just a tester after all, you know. The perf was improved after that, but nobody acknowledged the real world testing I'd done, much less the analysis and POC dev work. But flash forward a few years, and my career has progressed. Suddenly I am a manager in a performance review meeting where the promotion of someone I used to work with was up for discussion. I sat across the table from the person's boss when he capped off his argument for promotion with (paraphrasing), "and let's all remember, this is the genius who figured out we needed to add compression to our remoting stream."

"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery"

Welcome to the club. As one that has been building entire enterprise platforms and adding unique features and functions for decades my vast experiences reflect that there will never be a shortage of people looking to claim others work as their own, even steal it to start another company as this happens very frequently yet just does not get as much attention as it should I believe. I have experienced this at every level even down to one claiming to have built and architected an entire company's systems which was entirely my own effort. I also have direct experience with developers stealing I.P. and starting "new" companies, being discovered, sued, losing the suit and then having their wages garnished for millions in restitution. This is sure to happen more and more as technology is built into all devices needed or not and thus business opportunities increase allowing others to apply those stolen ideas. There are A LOT of narcissist egotists out there and I would encourage everyone to avoid them at all costs as they are toxic to business.

If he took the implementation with him to Apple that's IP theft. Did you mention this to legal at your employer? They might have a case there.

Maybe we should have. This was well over a decade ago now. It wasn't something we could easily prove either. We just had strong suspicions based on the timing and his behavior.

It wouldn't surprise me at all. One of the things that we check for during technical DD is to ensure that all of the IP the company claims as theirs really is theirs. Large dumps of code into a repo just after incorporation or just after a new hire are pretty suspicious and require an explanation, such an explanation isn't always available.

Good team leads / code reviewers / laywers can be real assets because they will stop such a thing before it gets to the stage of doing significant damage to the company.

If you have a 1000x programmer on your team you may have a problem (or you've hired Fabrice).

Copyright lawsuits have one interesting property: the statue of limitations starts when you first became aware of the infringement, not when the deed was done. So you may still have a case, even today, because technically you are still unaware that the infringement happened, it may have happened, but you have no proof. If such proof ever surfaces then that would be the point in time to trigger the suit, and such proof can be obtained through the weirdest channels.

I once became aware a company had been started by an ex employee based on a large body of code that I wrote, and through sheer chance I found a tiny sliver of really hard proof. That's what set the ball rolling.

In case any case any readers don’t know who “Fabrice” is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard

Our neighbor started doing this with my dad. My dad was a school teacher and didn't have any sort of content to plagiarize. The man started buying the same clothing as my father, the same surfboard, same car, dyed his hair the same color and got the same haircut, got fake glasses in the same style and even started copying his mannerisms. It was bizarre. We moved shortly after it started for unrelated reasons but it was pretty terrifying as a young kid.

Interestingly enough, he was a PHD student.

I bet PhD programs attract narcissists like flies to ...

In a way, a PhD could be seen as the ultimate intellectual validation.

A tip to get rid of an annoying neighbour perhaps? :p

A popular label they pick these days is Moralist.

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-cruel-moraliser-uses-a-halo-t...

Really enjoyed reading this. Fantastic essay.

I disagree that the label is "moralist". The essay outlines various types of moralism, which I think is important to distinct them. Such as vain vs cruel and pure vs impure moralism.

However, regardless of all that, there are two important questions to ask when dealing with moralism. First, what's the motivation? Second, what's the method of implementation? A cruel moralist is motivated by self-validation in moral superiority, and a vain moralist is motivated by group-validation (vanity) that uses moralism as a tool (their method of implementation).

In this case, it is vanity that is the motivation, but narcissism in how they go about doing it. Moralism is neither a motivation, nor a method of execution.

I really don't see any connection. Can you elaborate.

I doubt it's a narcissist and I'm saying that as a narcissist myself.

That fragile ego basically means narcissists are afraid of humiliation. On top that, mentally everything is build around shoring up my ego to compensate for the low self esteem. My ego. Not someone else's ego. I'd have to do some really weird mental gymnastics to be satisfied with copying someone else's work, that would just lower my ego even more. I guess it's doable if I straight up believe I'm that other person? But now we're talking about something really special and uncommon. Not just a narcissist anymore. The narcissistic self deception is involuntary, I can't just say "well, I know I'm copying the work of that person, but now I believe that's me." It doesn't work like that.

The person doing this clearly knew there was considerable risk of getting caught and being exposed. That's someone that doesn't give a fuck about the social consequences.

So you were closer with the malignants, but it's probably just a sociopath (ASPD). A lot more rare in general and more willing to take risks.

I don’t quite understand the downvotes. Narcissists, psychopaths, autistic, etc are technical terms, not an abstract labeling for “smart person with completely inhuman thinking”.

Pointing at who seems to be an insane man and calling him a “narcissist” is like pointing at a Chrome window and saying “this folder on Desktop” and okay grandma I get it but that is technically wrong. OP is just explaining the situation.

The Internet when I grew up was abundant of horror stories around encounter with insane person, and there were definitely multiple different modes of failure, like charging towards the storyteller with a knife in hand, the person leaving the identity behind as if it was nothing, storyteller being the unreliable narrator, etc etc. Usually the best response seemed to be either to display a skill that the imposter can’t replicate, or applying hard rules that allows no alternate interpretations so that they cannot elongate the drama.

I don’t know which cliche suggests which diagnosis and armchair diagnosis is at best useless, but it is true that there are types, and if OP thinks it’s not the same type as his own, that is at least an anecdatapoint.

e: ok I didn’t read the top comment. Clinical distinction don’t matter, you just have to know how to defend against. And it’s documented. That is right. I’ll keep this comment as a shame to myself.

Mm, no, I think I agree with your original assessment. You and the top comment both seem correct.

(Also, no need to think of it as a shame game. It's more interesting to learn something.)

Let's put it this way. If you're mistaken, then I don't understand it either, so hopefully someone will explain.

More concretely, reading the list of how to defend against narcissism, it felt like lots of people tend to have some of these traits, but usually not all of them. If it's a partial match, how should you interpret it? Is there some sort of narcissistic meter that goes up as you accumulate points?

It seems hard to define.

> The narcissistic self deception is involuntary

Self-aware narcissists are pretty rare too. Can you e-mail me? Info in profile.

Here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/narcissism/comments/mde5fh/biweekly...

It's my post/sub. You're free to dig in my history and/or DM me.

And of course there are plenty more self aware narcissists to hang out with as well.

You created /r/narcissism, and also label yourself a narcissist? That has to be some kind of high score or something. :)

Very interesting. Thanks for posting it.

Thanks. Contacted you there.

What evidence is there that it is rare?

I'd say it's fairly rare. Most therapists often won't diagnose patients, because it's considered not helpful to the trust relationship and trying to make someone that's narcissistic understand that they are narcissistic is... Hard, because of the splitting and the disconnect between the internal self image and the external presentation.

They'll often mirror or turn it back on you and there's not much you can say at that point ("I'm a narcissist? No! You are a narcissist!"). It's a tricky disorder.

> Narcissists Online: http://www.issendai.com/psychology/narcissism/narcissists-on...

I'm not sure how serious I should take this site. Most things they bring forth are valid for the majority of discussions when they enter the heat phase. Some other aspects naturally grow with more experience in throwaway discussions. But I don't wanna think that because of this everyone online is a Narcissist.

And what the heck is with those mixed overly specific topics on this site? Is this someones private homepage?