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Comment by kstenerud | Hacker News Reader

The wording of some of the questions is unfortunate.

"1. It is hard to get ahead without cutting corners here and there."

This is actually (unfortunately) true. The powerful have the largest sway over the rules, and therefore the rules (and more importantly their enforcement) favour the powerful. You're left with the moral dilemma of being the nice guy and potentially a doormat, or engaging in varying degrees of rule breaking in order to protect your interests. Mind you, this can also be used as justification by those who are not actually at a disadvantage.

"8. I try to make sure others know about my successes."

This is a piece of advice that everyone would be well advised to follow. If nobody knows of your success, you won't get very far. Or even worse, people will only see your failures, because negative things tend to stick in the mind much easier than positive things.

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The real problem with this question is that there’s no standard for what “cutting corners” means. Alice might feel like she cut corners if she didn’t fully document a piece of code. Bob might feel like he cut corners if he hacked up a crypto exchange in PHP and never did any testing.

Alice’s threshold is lower. By an independent standard she cuts corners less, but feels equally bad about it and might self-report the same level of corner-cutting.

An interesting question to ask is to describe a time when someone cut corners. The magnitude of the cutting and how bad they felt gives some insight.

A person who don't believe that it is hard to get ahead without cutting corners is more trustworthy. It isn't about the validity of the claim but what it says about the person.

And in many fields it isn't hard to get ahead without cutting corners. In fact it is easier to get a job at Google or Facebook if you don't cut corners and learn your theory properly in school instead of just studying for the test or cheat.

Edit: Changed harder to easier. It is easier to get a good job if you don't cut corners during your education.

My issue with the question is that "cutting corners" is kind of ambiguous.

If I leverage an existing relationship with an employee at a company in order to get an interview, is that corner cutting? It happens all the time. What if I did it specifically knowing I was probably going to jump to the front of the line?

Some of these things framed as dark traits can also be framed as strategically intelligent.

I believe the wording is deliberate. Perhaps it's crafted to differentiate between "justifying beliefs" associated with the D-factor and accepting that there are people who get ahead by doing bad things without taking that as a justification to join them. I do believe that "people who cut corners make life harder for everyone else", but I answered "strongly disagree" to 1.

Perhaps your answers to 1 and 8 just revealed a dark trait in you?

That is definitely the case at least for me -- I scored low in general, but relatively high on moral disengagement, which I think that question is about.

It just blows my mind because I, like the person you're responding to, couldn't even imagine there being a different way to view it until I started thinking about why they put that question in there! ("It must be because with a different personality, the answer is not an obvious agreement." I just hadn't imagined someone might view the world like that. Love this type of thing.)

> Perhaps your answers to 1 and 8 just revealed a dark trait in you?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

> It is hard to get ahead without cutting corners here and there.

How can someone read a statement like this and immediately decide whether they agree with it or not? The meaning of this sentence is so ambiguous I need to break it down to decide what I actually think about it.

Firstly, what do we mean by "get ahead"? Presumably they're talking in the general sense of "getting ahead in life", which usually refers to career-related goals. In this case, it's probably easiest to assume they mean something along the lines of "out-performing your competitors". So we can reframe the question as "it is hard to out-perform your competitors without cutting corners". But what do they mean by "cutting corners"?

The term cutting corners itself is morally ambiguous. A shady mechanic who uses cheap, low-quality parts could be seen as cutting corners. But a developer who uses a library to take care of some task rather than writing custom code from scratch could also be seen to be cutting corners. In the context of the questionnaire, we should probably assume that they mean cutting corners in the negative sense. So the statement ultimately becomes something like "it is hard to out-perform your competitors without using shortcuts that cause some amount of harm to yourself or others". Notice that they used the word "hard", here; they're not asking whether I think it's possible, only whether I think it's difficult.

I think I would have to say, then, that I agree with the statement, since I often cause harm to myself by cutting corners (not organizing files correctly in the moment, for example) in the interest of saving time and out-pacing my competitors. Choosing not to cut corners would still be doable, but it would be harder.

I look forward to doing this for all the other questions so I can finally discover what a huge jerk I am.

> Firstly, what do we mean by "get ahead"? Presumably they're talking in the general sense of "getting ahead in life", which usually refers to career-related goals.

I think that there's a much wider sense to "get ahead" - social climbing and perceived status, as well as in your career.

Saying it's about "out-performing competitors" is also a little narrow, and is going to depend on how you measure out-performance. Do you measure it purely by the merits of what you do, or do you measure it purely by how much you get ahead of others, regardless of how that is achieved?

> But a developer who uses a library to take care of some task rather than writing custom code from scratch could also be seen to be cutting corners.

In this modern world I'd say that knocking something up from scratch, when there's a perfectly good library right there, is the worse behaviour! And I definitely wouldn't consider that corner-cutting.

> In this modern world I'd say that knocking something up from scratch, when there's a perfectly good library right there, is the worse behaviour! And I definitely wouldn't consider that corner-cutting.

I mostly agree, but this also depends on the context. If the library is bloated and you only need it for one small task, it could be considered corner-cutting.

This just goes to show how much difficulty I have answering these types of questions. There are so many different interpretations, I often end up trying to decipher what I think the question is trying to ask me rather than what my own personal reading is.

In fairness, that part of the article seems like it might be an invention of the author, who probably is not all that qualified to develop a psychological inventory. I'd expect an instrument based on the described paper to be considerably more extensive, and presumably able to control for distinctions like these.

That said, I realize this is psych research and, in light of the ongoing replication crisis, may deserve somewhat less benefit of the doubt than I am giving it in this comment.

There's a disclaimer at the end of the article, right below the "test":

> Note: The Dark Core Scale was adapted from the larger test battery. I selected the items on an ad-hoc basis for entertainment purposes, but I do not recommend using the scale to make any sort of diagnosis.

The author is a well respected psychology researcher, teaching at Penn, etc.

Cutting corners isn't necesarily about rule breaking in a disruptive way. It can be about not doing a proper job, ignoring safety constraints etc

> If nobody knows of your success, you won't get very far.

But you don't have to crow about it at family gatherings, social functions etc. The server at the diner doesn't need to know about your business win.

You're looking at it through a lens of work-related self-promotion there. And even there, there are limits.

I'm looking at it through the lens of semantic ambiguity, which is something that must be VERY carefully accounted for when building serious questionnaires for research purposes.

Improperly formulated questions can invalidate your results if a significant enough percentage of your respondents are answering a different question from what you intended. And the worst part is that you won't even know what your error rate is, which makes it even more important to make your questions as airtight as possible beforehand, to the point of even doing a study of peoples understanding of the semantic meaning of the questions in the questionnaire itself.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say you should have multiple versions of the questionnaire, and bin them for comparison to discover biases.

But, as another commenter mentioned, there's a disclaimer about the questions at the end of the article.

It's not even stated as a questionnaire.

While the statements themselves can be seen as ambiguous, if you look at them widely across all areas of life rather than specifically work/business then they make more sense.

It casts light on how we are asked to act in a work context though. And perhaps on how much you see yourself as primarily in that context.

> It casts light on how we are asked to act in a work context though. And perhaps on how much you see yourself as primarily in that context.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

That would be an ad hominem if I was trying to say your argument was invalid because of who you are, I am not.

Quite the opposite in fact, I was saying your words may shed light on your character, not the other way around.

Unless that's your professional opinion as a psychologist after examining me in person, you're engaging in speculation as a backhand attack against my character, in order to pre-emptively disarm any further contributions to the discussion (ad-hominem).

"1. It is hard to get ahead without cutting corners here and there."

One can think that it's true and be proud to not to do it.

A good question is, who built the corners? They might not be justified. You seem to get this as well.

You seem to think that getting ahead in life is important; that is, you feel a need to be seen as superior to other people. Similarly, you seem to value other people having a high opinion of you.

Your code profile boasts of over two decades of experience. Your repositories include a "showcase of [your] best work" and "specifications for better computing". It certainly sounds like you believe that you won't get far if you don't boast about what you've done, and additionally like you're inclined to describe yourself as achievative rather than eudaemonic; as somebody who has done many great things rather than somebody who is continually growing and learning.

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