>> The 55-country study he cited has effectively one of the highest P-values in
social science of recent years. It's widely considered in psychology to be an
important result. Denying this is basically parroting intellectual dishonesty
on the level of Global Warming denialism.
Of course it is not and I take umbrage at the offensive undertone of your
comment ("parroting"? Really?). Psychology is not climate science, it's
currently going through a widely publicised reproducibility crisis and in any
case, the reliance on p-values has been criticised widely by experts in
fields as varied as economics, medicine and of course the humanities. The big-5 model itself has been the subject of much criticism, from inside the field (and the wikipedia article you reference has a big section devoted to that criticism).
More improtantly however, Damore did a lot more than name-drop the big-5 in
his memo. The memo is peppered with references to sources from varied fields,
from psychology and sociology, to biology, evolutionary psychology,
anthropology, economics, statistics and so on.
The problem of course is that Damore is not an expert in any of those fields-
much less an expert in all of them. Which tells us that, most of the time,
when he says that some paper he's referencing is backing his views, he simply
hasn't got a clue what he's talking about and the paper may very well be
claiming exactly the opposite than what Damore is saying.
Damore's memo is indulging in cargo-cult science. He references stuff he
half-understands in the hopes to do what scientists do. Except he doesn't even
understand what scientists do and why they reference others' work: which is to
say, not to win a debate and show you're right on the internets, but to
contribute new knowledge by building on the knowledge already contributed by
others.
To have any respect for science and consider Damore's memo anything else than
pseudo-scientific claptrap is a contradiction. To call that garbage "science"
is offensive to the work of scientists. That is an even bigger reason to be
angry at an idiot like that, without even going to what he was trying to say
with his "sai-ent-tifickal" way.