Scientists have created the darkness measure, D score, for how dark you are | Hacker News Reader

Scientists have created the darkness measure, D score, for how dark you are

darkfactor.org

One inaccuracy factor about this test is how it equates legality to morality. If the test taker does not think legality is equal to morality, then some thoughts they will have would be marked as dark when they are not.

If a person is helping slaves escape an underground railroad, despite it being illegal, are their answers about their opinions of legality correct? If someone ignores segregation laws and sits on an empty seat that they are not allowed to on the bus, are they dark for 'disregarding the law' to 'get ahead'? They get to sit on the bus sooner after all!

If they think the law is wrong, is that different than them thinking the law it correct and doing it anyway to get ahead? Need to tease that out in their question set, or avoid questions having to do with the law.

Another commenter said that the test came from northern europe where there is more trust in institutions and government. I bet they will get higher 'dark' scores where people do not trust their governments, and inaccurately so.

EDIT: And since 2 of them are in germany, you have a fairly accepted cultural reference of law gone wrong in recent german history too!

Just took the test and was thinking exactly the same

Probably a good idea to alert them to this flaw. If this test were ever to be used as an official tool, we'd have a lot of trouble since people tend to turn off their brains once they have a tool to do their thinking for them.

I also thought that agreeing with the item that was something like "it is wise to break the law to achieve your goals" is more of a sign of stupidity than 'darkness'.

The problem is that answers to such questions cannot give meaningful information without context.

Is it wise to break the law by running a bunch of red lights to achieve your goals? Yes if your goal is to get your wife to the hospital before she bleeds out, no if your goal is to get to the game on time.

Making the context unambiguous is extremely important in this field, so much so that entire industries have arisen for it.

Narrowing the context narrows the relevancy for different people at different times. E.g. Which of my wives are talking about? What’s the game price? Which country I’m at? But they could frame it as “if in a hard situation that you could realistically get into in your life once in a couple of years, in a usual environment”.

The question should be about frequency then. How often do you actually do this kind of behavior for light or typical transgressions, whether you care if anyone is looking and whether you care about scale of punishment.

Rare situations are bit of a problem, people are notoriusly bad at predicting what they will do in rare circumstances.

admitting such beliefs to the authorities is certainly a sign of stupidity! Though maybe that's what the test is actually intended to measure. If I were running a large organization I'd want a way to identify 'low-neuroticism rule followers' more urgently than 'moral actors'.

In case anybody else is trying to get the item sets, check your spam folder. (BTW this weird thing where Chrome blocks .zip downloads from HTTP sites is new to me)

With the G and now D taken...were there other letters too? Is there an alphabet race coming on? It is feeling a bit like a cultural meme-launch--what letter will be next?

Some ideas, maybe these would help us all:

S, for People Who Are Generally Spies

Y, for a unification of theories around detecting a Youtuber in your environs

C, for understanding people who Tend to Invent Cryptocurrencies

F, for a unified theory of Generally Fishy People

Yep, it's just the academic version of domain squatting. There's good money in both being associated with a fashionable scientific metric (pseudo or not) and in selling - sorry, licensing - tests to institutional buyers that want to run them on everyone in the criminal justice system.

It's pretty wild to think about this being run on a bunch of people for serious reasons, because I'm reading through the items and it seems easy to game, in that the generally "morally right" choice seems obvious.

"I tend to forgive the wrongs I have suffered." Oh yeah. For _sure_, institutions who are in charge of assessing me, I would _definitely_ tend to forgive those wrongs...

Hopefully this would be one of many instruments used...

Plus with error around things like maybe not-so-necessary English issues for lower-level readers: "There is poor comfort in revenge." Phrasing?

Items requiring more analytical thinking to understand than other items: "If I opposed the election of an official, then I would be glad to see him or her fail even if their failure hurt my community."

Just to say--love the research, really curious about the application...

Those are good criticisms. My (2nd hand) understanding is that in institutional settings where there would be incentives to lie on a self-report the grading is done on a clinical instrument by a professional who educes the answers through conversation rather than stating them plainly. At least, that's how the Hare psychopathy checklist is done, and subjects who would score high on that are disproportionately likely to want to game such an instrument.

Ideally, a psychometric test has a validity scale (e.g. the MMPI)

Thanks, that's really interesting. The professional aspect is a little bit concerning TBH. From what I learned in instruction on psychometric instruments in the past I think I'd be inclined to request that some random sample of N professionals carry this out. Especially to the degree that some individual's institutional future hangs in the balance...

Just wait for NFTs on the alphabet.

I have colleagues (lawyers) who make a killing doing nothing more than suing various companies for “infringement” of these copyrighted “models.”

This is a gross oversimplification, but someone mentions d-score in a textbook without licensing, and suddenly you get a lawsuit demanding you reprint every single textbook (or you can make a retroactive licensing payment—how convenient).

C is taken.

My then-four year old saw K&R on my desk, with the large C displayed prominently on the cover, and exclaimed "A book about Carbon!". Carbon is his nickname (his sisters are Hydrogen and Oxygen, guess what my internal nickname for the ex is).

Radon?

Radon would also be a good one!

Nitrogen is the remaining organic element - and in our language the word for nitrogen literally translates to "the choking one". Our words for Carbon, Hydrogen, and Oxygen do describe the kid's personalities very well too - "the dirty one", "the watery one" (her name literally is "much water") and "the one who interferes with everything".

So your nickname is Carboxylic acid?

Don't let the kids hear this! They'll adopt it!

Not a fan of those. The questions are imprecise. What does "is it better?" even mean? Better for me? Better for ethical reasons? Better for the society?

How about the torment question? If I torment someone that I think deserves it I wouldn't feel bad at all. If I somehow end up tormenting someone not fully deserving it I would feel very bad. They seem to think beliefs justifying hurting others for good reasons are dark. I think the contrary: it's your duty to society to make sure to apply swift payback for bad behaviors. It's usually altruistic as well: you won't feel any better and it might cost you but the world is a better place when there are consequences for bad behavior.

I still scored low 2.57. It's scary to think so many people score much higher.

There isn't much respect left in me when it comes to social psychology. Seeing yet another survey using imprecise language doesn't help. I seriously question this branch as science at this point. Did it every produce anything useful when it comes to making predictions about actual people?

OMG a personality test! I love these in Cosmo!

I feel like I can be a pretty ruthless person and I only scored about the middle of the range. Pretty terrifying to imagine a good chunk of the population is allegedly even darker

By middle of the range, do you mean 2.5 or actually where the median person scores? Because scoring a 4.0/5.0 nets you a 98th percentile placement (don't ask me how I know).

It made me wonder, reading through the items--a lot of these are "little picture" questions / items. I would guess--just as a spitball--that a lot of the people who would test really dark are going to be handled better by the rest of us, systematically, over time, in ways that support the best they can do for themselves and for the rest of us. That's even part of the point of this instrument.

Humanity is getting more and more big-picture-oriented in general (planning, teamwork, contingency thinking, scoping, scheduling, emotional intelligence, etc. are all freely taught even to low-paid workers in many cases) and has even begun to coalesce around a "curable disease" model of evil (i.e. latest Spider-Man film). In addition, highly-sensory forms of entertainment which allow expression of the D traits offered are also available, theoretically making a restorative bounce to the opposite frame of mind, something like the Yin response, possible...

(Definitely speculation but I'd risk it)

Amazing that hundreds of thousands finished the test and about 200 people finished the test while I was making it. I wish I had so many participants.

That is magic of front page of HN.

The magic of front page of HN is usually a few dozen additional hits per hour. Sometimes it might get into the hundreds for something really relevant to the specific crowd here, but I doubt that this particular issue is that high-interest for HN. Actually R'ing TFA is still a very high bar!

People love to be told things about themselves, even if not particularly accurate or reliable, like a Magic 8-Ball. Tests like this benefit greatly from the network effect as people want to compare scores with friends and family.

People claiming to be scientists have created a test which alleges to be able to provide a numerical value to morality. Fixed that for you.

Read the title and thought it was a measure of melanation rather than an expanded version of the dark triad.

Same here. I was wondering how they are going to achieve it, and if we are supposed to send them our pictures with standard grayscale charts held against our face or something.

How dark am I if I’m immediately suspicious and hesitant to take personality tests like this? Who knows what psychological profiles they are building of unsuspecting masses…

No worries, being suspicious on a contingency basis isn't even close to being in there. Plus the person who would get those sneaky reports is probably dark enough to ignore them anyway. Why? Because people generally think other people think like they do. Ergo--everybody games the test anyway, so I'll just skip the tedious data and go after those I don't like. Following objective data is also a way of giving up one's own sense of subjective power.

BTW you can self-score if you download the items and read the word doc.

How dark am I if I have deliberately chosen the most 'moral' option that I can think of and still checked the box that asks if youve answered the questions honestly?

I scored incredibly far on the left and now I feel woefully inequipped for everyday life.

For real, it's heavy business just to read through the items. I'll bet at least some of the researchers had to set serious boundaries with their own work. I wouldn't be surprised if their personal worlds got very dark for a time, even if they knew in advance that this kind of work was ahead of them.

I also scored far on the left and I'm doing okay in life. You don't need to be evil to get shit done. Just get shit done.

Likewise. I am definitely on the Light Side of the Force and have done well. While I would say it cost me earlier in my career, the reputation and quality benefits that have accrued through life were more than worth the early struggle. I just really do try to do /good/ to people as it's broadly defined on a "typical" issue.

TBH, nobody really likes working with such jerks, you might not realize that they also don't get ahead in their careers more often than not. I'm fairly certain most highly dark people are in prison, especially the spiteful.

The sad part of the story is people often cognitive dissonance themselves about the bad they do in the world, or make it abstract because most people don't like to be the bad guy of their personal story and might score as being a fairly light person, even if they do harm.

As someone else on the left it's pretty eye opening just to read some of the questions.

Would you take a punch if someone you hated took two punches?

Would you go to hell if you could ensure your rivals ended up there with you?

Jesus. Who goes through life collecting people they hate this much? Maybe I've been lucky but I don't have any rivals that I'd want to see with anything more serious than a papercut or mild social embarrassment.

Scoring on the left but knowing and not succumbing to how a high D-score person thinks is a good sign :)

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

- Sun Tzu, The Art of War

I feel like if someone actually took sun tzu's teachings to heart, they would almost certainly lean to the right on this test.

Not only Sun Tzu, I think any warrior can tell you that war is knowledge and misinformation. War is not an everyday life (for the lucky ones), which I assume this test tests.

I scored 30%, which seems like enough self interest to survive but not enough to hurt others regularly.

Don't feel bad about being on the left! I would much rather have you in my life than someone on the right (unless perhaps we're in a war or something).

I scored 2.88 (77%) and still can’t live it well. As all tests, it may bring random acute thoughts at each question and you doubt if you should answer honestly and situatively, or “generally”, which you are not, in every situation. Maybe I just suck at tests and someone has to tell me.

Only if success in life is a function of psychopathy, sociopathy or narcissistic personality disorder.

The "darkness" metric is meant to sample the traits that, in high quantities, make for some pretty pathologic - sometimes criminal - disorders.

I scored very very left on this, but plenty of people still think of me as a jerk because I don’t always hide moral criticisms against others - and I think there is a strong grouping quality to being at the center of the darkness bell curve. In that area you push out both the very left and very right people.

It's interesting that most results are "light".

I took the test and ended up in the middle of the scale, but apparently relatively few people end up there.

That's to be expected, I think. A mostly-dark or even a mid-dark population would have trouble out-competing mostly-light populations over time due to issues with internal discord.

The accuracy of such tests is of course as suspect as for g, but I would expect that for optimum competitiveness, there has to be at least a small amount of this kind of variety in any society, tending much more towards light than dark.

3.77 / 97%

Yikes, it seems I am more out of touch with common sense than I thought. I really don‘t feel that „dark“ though. I usually try not to rock the boat, but if I can take 2 cookies with the only consequence being someone else will get none and the guarantee I won‘t get caught, I will probably take it.

Or, given the world we live in, you have too much common sense.

Anyone up for a lawsuit?

"I understand that it is impossible to link my personal identity and the data or responses I provide."

Psychometric tests are rather trivially linkable given a small amount of metadata.

This would fall under "I like to make claims I know cannot be true for personal gain"

Why is agreeing with "It's wise to keep track of information that you can use against people later" an indicator of dark traits? This is what a lawyer does when building a case against a suspect. Are all lawyers somewhat 'dark'?

Yes :)

In About they cite a reference that claims that "darkness" is functionally distinct from the Big Five's agreeableness, maybe there's something here.

My D score is 2.09 Watch out everyone! :)

3.59/94%

I'm quite evil!

And didn't even cheat this time.

No really, I swear.

Come on, where should be the advantage?

I wonder how this correlates to business success.

Massive loading spinner obscuring the content :(

How does this ever seem like a good idea?

Better than Shimmer, IMO.

But a real loading bar? chefs kiss I love that design.

Fake loading bar? No fun.

Oh, is it just like Spearman's G? Lovely!

I realize this project is organized by a bunch of northern European universities whose staffers might be somewhat oblivious, but someone should really tell them how terms like light and dark as applied to persons can lead to unwanted confusion and unintended results.

We really shouldn't be sacrificing whole words just to appease cranks who won't be satisfied anyway. The English language has subtleties and people should stop trying to conflate meanings just to feed the outrage.

You're talking about a situation where priming is relevant. Your objection doesn't address the problem.

Agreed. I'm all for inclusivity, but everybody knows (by and large) what a one's "dark side" means, and that it has nothing to do with ethnicity (which is what the GP is hinting at).. Viewers don't assume Dexter's *dark passenger" is a representation of a Black person, nor Dar(k|th) Vader (despite being dressed all in black, and coincidentally, even dubbed by a Black actor). Darkness is a well established idiom in psychology, and if there's any confusion about it, I wouldn't say it's "unwanted" - more like deliberately assumed, explicitly suggested, intended.

Maybe someone should tell American universities that not everything revolves around race.

Not everything does, but it seems like you're suggesting they throw out a lot of good data indicating that many things do. It's an issue because disparities in areas like criminal justice tend to be self-perpetuating and mutually reinforcing.

America's racism issues is not the same as the racism issues in other countries, and it's frustratingly racist of americans to assume that it basically is, the world over.

You'll be surprised to find that in some countries, everyone's skin color and look is the same and they still have their own unique twist on racism that has lasted for hundreds of years. In other countries, skin color is the not racism focus point, even though there is skin color variation and other things are!

Nobody is making such an assumption. But you might like to think about what is the largest market for English language clinical instruments that purport to measure moral factors in objective terms

Presumably the so-called 'dark personality traits' have nothing to do with skin color but the adjective 'dark' as something that is threatening is because the night is dark which is ultimately derived from the fact that we are day animals. The so-called 'woke' crowd is not there because anything they say is beneficial but because they enjoy being holier-than-thou and policing the utterings of everyone.

Or at least that America's specific, very real race issues are not global or even universal across all English-speaking cultures.

It's a common response on Reddit that Europe is far more racist than America because they're blind to their own problems.

The trouble with engaging in good faith with that kind of ideology is that it's often used, deliberately or otherwise, to obscure class conflict. Because racial tensions are seen as both more personal and more impossible to solve than class tensions, it tends to drag the conversation out of the realm where solutions could even be proposed. Funnily enough that bit of obfuscation seems to mostly benefit people with enough family wealth to afford a degree at an American university[1].

I had a very off-putting exchange with a redditor in which I argued that the class interests of the working poor and those dependent on welfare were quite different, and that this explained much of the demographic fault-lines in the 2016 election. He immediately accused me of equating ethnic minorities with the welfare class, despite the fact the Trump administration was at the time very publicly talking about the recent drop in black unemployment. For all of the Reddit community's talk about acknowledging one's own problems, the fact that he personally was equating black people with unemployment and his political enemies were doing the opposite wasn't something he could consciously engage with. "America has a racism problem, but only the half I don't identify with". I don't doubt that kind of projection is present all over the place where this subject comes up.

[1]I wouldn't be surprised if the fact much of Europe subsidises post secondary education contributes to the fact that the debate is different there - not enough of a class marker if you don't need a private tutor to make it over the line.

'dark' has been used in psychology forever to refer to such traits. There's no evidence these terms were used in the actual construction of the test, so not sure what your point is - it's an online test, mostly for fun as far as i can tell

What on earth is happening at American universities that makes anyone think for a second that light/dark as used in psychology has anything to do with skin color and not, as is the case, with probably one of humanities oldest existing metaphors, namely darkness and light.

You're assuming I picked up such ideas at a university, but that's not the case. Nor do I avidly consume ethnic studies or other stereotypically 'social justice' papers/books etc. I am interested in criminal justice issues and rigorous data-driven approaches to measuring the effectiveness of institutions.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3834710

Perhaps you should make fewer assumptions and follow the data where it leads.

After scrolling through an entire 40 page paper on the risks of using machine learning in criminal justice systems I have absolutely no idea how that is related to psychology terminology in Northern Europe.

Is there a name for a strategy in debate where you just throw a random paper at people and hope they don't click on it?

> Is there a name for a strategy in debate where you just throw a random paper at people and hope they don't click on it?

The Internet argument.

Similarly, you can also use the same term when someone's defense is the first google result for the keywords in the argument you're having, but they didn't actually read the article they linked.

Nice dodge. If you had spent some time reading it instead of just scrolling you might have noticed the numerous references to racial disparities in parole hearings and the effort to assess outcomes in rigorous fashion.

The sad reality is you tried to hang a lame trope about 'American universities' on me and when that failed you switched to a disingenuous posture of being too cool to engage with an example of a statistically rigorous paper. While you're moaning about humanity's oldest metaphors I'm pointing out that such metaphors are often vehicles for bias which have measurable real world outcomes, deliberate or not.

Hi anigbrowl, I really enjoy this community. I don't think anyone likes to read things like:

> The sad reality is you tried to

> While you're moaning about

Let's follow the guidelines:

> Be kind. Don't be snarky.

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

I spent about 15 minutes looking over that paper you linked and it looks like the researchers are discussing systemic problems and biases in the American legal system. Race is one of the variables they studied in their model. Their results show that Non-Black candidates are treated more favorably than Black candidates in the legal system. Am I understanding the part you wanted to highlight? The paper and results makes sense to me but I don't understand how that directly relates to Barrin92's original point.

I understand that someone could see Black people being discriminated against and connect that to the word "dark" being used to describe a negative trait. I get that using the same word to describe someone's race and describe something as negative can be bad. Is that what's happening here though? How do we determine which of the following examples from marriam-webster.com [0] are OK to use?

- They walked into the dark room, it was devoid of light.

- They are wearing dark clothing.

- They prefer/dislike dark rum.

- There were dark powers that lead to war.

- They have a dark view of the future.

- They had a dark period of history.

- They enjoy dark humor.

- Most of their dealings were done in the dark.

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dark

Perhaps you could address your reminder about guidelines to the person who replied to a tactful comment with 'What on earth is happening at American universities [...]'. The only original point of that comment was to generate an emotional reaction.

I replied by pointing out that said trope doesn't apply to me and citing my preference for a data driven approach, a polite rejoinder which was rudely rebuffed.

Let's follow another guideline [0]:

> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

Barrin92 brought up American universities where it wasn't necessary. I get it. Let's not dismiss their comment because they brought that up. I looked past that and I am trying to keep this on topic by discussing the point they made.

Does the paper you linked say anything about using the words "light" and "dark"?

How do we determine which definitions of "dark" we should use in a professional context?

I think this topic is important to discuss and I am genuinely curious how you and others would address the points in my previous comment.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please take it up with them.

I agree with you, I was raised in a religious tradition where this distinction between light and dark was institutionally overplayed, went right into covert traditions & pronouncements around race and to this day it's basically an issue that everybody in the org with a brain is racing to put behind them.

We can be creative and do better with the terminology, bring something new and improved forward for those who follow. It shouldn't be a big deal.

thanks

Please don't try to pull the woke card here. It's simply not acceptable.

Humans, like all diurnal animals, fear the dark.

Most horror films don’t take place at 2pm in broad daylight.

Dark-skinned people fear the dark no less than light-skinned people do.

Virtue signaling gets upvotes on Twitter/Reddit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com