Larry is guilty of a lot of things - but his high profile was very calculated and served business interests.

What inspired me to ask is that John Cullinane had earlier volunteered the same question to me, and given the opposite answer, which also surprised me.

This was all in the late 1980s. And it was a staple of my conversations with Larry that he blast other people, commonly in quite humorous terms.

Larry's also the person who first told me of the bit about almost everybody thinking they were above average ...

I'm getting the impression that Larry is checking out now; the engagement he had ten years ago doesn't seem to be there anymore.

So I asked why we bought it. I was told that Larry took any opportunity to buy a potential competitor. My role would be to spend perhaps a year understanding their technology deeply. Then some number of months creating an integration plan for any technology we might want to keep. Then managing an Oracle team responsible for integrating the technology into Oracle products. And finally winding down the company.

Well, I've spent my entire career creating things. And now I was being asked to destroy things. So I thought "Is this what I want to do?". So I turned down an offer that was really coming from Larry and senior management - I figured it was time to go. (This was over 10 years ago - Larry was still very involved.)

Consider two independent fair die rolls, with A and C being the outcomes. Let B be the sum of the outcomes. The higher A is, the higher B is likely to be, so A and B are positively correlated. So are B and C. However there is no correlation between A and C as they are independent.

Yeah, that was his point. Hope doesn't cut it. You kind of have to go off and prove your formula does correlate highly with true narcissism, not just skip on to the next step.

What is wrong with making up and using a narcissism metric and seeing what it correlates with? It's how social science is done, and how you discover results that are worth exploring. Get off your high horse.

> It's how social science is done, and how you discover results that are worth exploring.

Do you see the problem here? If you invent metrics, assume they work, then only pursue the ones that produce results "worth exploring"... can you see the problem?

Keep in mind that even the GP's original quote included at least two references to the difficulty in measuring the trait ('tricky' and 'had to use indirect measures'). It's not like the researcher boldly strode forth and said "This is the way, have faith!". The results are also suitably couched. It seems like this "bad science!" thread is making a mountain out of a molehill.

So are you telling me that the very best way we have of establishing narcissism is the "the frequency with which the CEO’s name appeared in company press releases"??

If not, then a scientist is required to either:

a) Use the best method.

or...

b) Develop a proxy and calibrate it against the best method.

You can't just postulate a proxy for narcissism out of thin fucking air and then use it.

It scares me that I have to explain this.

Your method much less robust than the method in the article, and it might not even get past an ethics committee, for that matter - formally questioning people about whether their boss was up themselves? Think about how could that possibly backfire and significantly harm the subjects. Where would you question them - at the workplace as a job lot? Or would you track them individually outside of work, where these kinds of questions about the boss could now be seen as an organised attempt at harrassment, given the effort required?

This was an exploratory study trying something out, with explicit mention that the measures were indirect. It's not like there's an international treaty being based on it. Calm the fuck down.

To pick at one example, do you think it is easy to get time to just sit down and talk with a CEO or their employees? Particularly when the subject of your research is how narcissistic the CEO might be?

Of course there is still the slight problem of determining whatever correlates you have found actually correlate with an abstract state like narcissism.

The problem with words is that people think they have a specific meaning. He created one for his study -- narcissism is defined as some weighted combination of those metrics.

Still does not pay to be an asshole though. If you want to call them assholes - I believe Jobs and Patton would have been just as successful if they had not been. But their legacies are (maybe forever) tarnished because of it.

Patton could have just as easily not gotten the chance to stage his magnificent campaign across Europe - just because of an "asshole" move. It wasn't worth it. Proves that people do still care about how others are treated.

Except the research doesn't support this opinion.

"Being nice" doesn't get you anywhere, but that's not the same as being a giver.

the slapping incidents were an example to Eisenhower, Marshall, and other leaders of Patton's brashness and impulsiveness

His most successful and famous campaigns can be described as brash and impulsive!

If that is your measure of narcissism, then it's fine -- but it should probably be called something else. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the first CEO in the above example was more successful than the second.

It's not mentioned in the abstract either, but I don't know whether we'd expect it to be.

When admitting mistake, use "we". Teamwork you know.

I believe that set a record for fewest minutes on screen in an Oscar-winning role. (Judi Dench as Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare in Love.)

This is rampant in socio/psycho academia and professionals. Not saying ALL of them are like this but in general, it is not a quantitative or strictly scientific field. Lot of the work done in this industry is self-fulfilling prophecies and their time is mostly spent on fabricating/bending truths and hard facts and say "here's a statistically significant outcome therefore assholes are great leaders".

It's laughable and I've stopped reading the article because I felt like it's built on the same shoddy science work and poor understanding of statistics and it's significance.