A little brief reading elsewhere still doesn’t explain what narcissist means here. Is it just a word that means “this group of symptoms (presumably commonly found together)”? If it doesn’t mean anything else, its use carries strong negative connotations that distract from the traits it encompasses.
The argument would be stronger if I could use the “narcissistic personality disorder” test for Petunia too,
I was under the impression that you identified Petunia as narcissistic first, and was using that as a predictor for Harry’s, my confusion.
“Narcissist” is just a word! Just kidding. It means “arrogant pride”. Here, it also means “arrogant pride as a defense mechanism against parental emotional neglect”.
When I first read about narcissistic parents, I pattern-matched on Petunia laughing at Harry and Harry being kind of arrogant. I expected to find examples in HPMOR for Harry showing about 1⁄2 to 2⁄3 of a list of narcissist traits. I was surprised to find examples for every item on the list.
“Arrogant pride”, or at least arrogance, is listed among the traits already, that doesn’t add anything to the meaning.
Imagine I’m writing a computer program that models people. People who exhibit a high number of these traits gain the label narcissist. Does this label allow me to make better or more efficient predictions about the person than the individual traits? What sorts of predictions?
The label is an efficient way of describing someone with most of or all of these traits. If your computer is memory-limited, storing the label “narcissist” may be more efficient than storing answers to all of a list of questions.
Someone who shows these traits will probably continue to show these traits. Additionally, someone who shows most of these traits probably shows the other traits as well.
A little brief reading elsewhere still doesn’t explain what narcissist means here. Is it just a word that means “this group of symptoms (presumably commonly found together)”? If it doesn’t mean anything else, its use carries strong negative connotations that distract from the traits it encompasses.
I was under the impression that you identified Petunia as narcissistic first, and was using that as a predictor for Harry’s, my confusion.
“Narcissist” is just a word! Just kidding. It means “arrogant pride”. Here, it also means “arrogant pride as a defense mechanism against parental emotional neglect”.
When I first read about narcissistic parents, I pattern-matched on Petunia laughing at Harry and Harry being kind of arrogant. I expected to find examples in HPMOR for Harry showing about 1⁄2 to 2⁄3 of a list of narcissist traits. I was surprised to find examples for every item on the list.
“Arrogant pride”, or at least arrogance, is listed among the traits already, that doesn’t add anything to the meaning.
Imagine I’m writing a computer program that models people. People who exhibit a high number of these traits gain the label narcissist. Does this label allow me to make better or more efficient predictions about the person than the individual traits? What sorts of predictions?
The label is an efficient way of describing someone with most of or all of these traits. If your computer is memory-limited, storing the label “narcissist” may be more efficient than storing answers to all of a list of questions.
Someone who shows these traits will probably continue to show these traits. Additionally, someone who shows most of these traits probably shows the other traits as well.