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A review of correlations between big five personality types and life outcomes

dynomight.net

131–140 of 261 posts

Re: A review of correlations between big five personality types and life outcomes

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellent—that sounds almost like a Bayesian approach, where personality corresponds to the prior, the context in which the person behaves is the likelihood, and the posterior is a distribution of behaviours. I guess a personal goal should then be to seek the context in which one’s strengths match best the demands. I would suggest an MCMC approach but I guess the evaluation of individual outcomes is too costly to mak…

I think it's more “a personality is a function over the continuous domain of situations”.

Not a contradiction! Bayesian inference is fully compatible with this definition.

Re: A review of correlations between big five personality types and life outcomes

#132
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have around a 148 IQ but scored only 1060 on the SAT. Clearly those two measures are not linked. This has not prevented me from earning a 4 year degree or becoming a software developer. I find writing software to be easy while many of my peers seem to struggle. In reflection personality and practice are all that have mattered. IQ isn’t a significant consideration of comfort/confidence in writing software, a skill.

Indeed. SAT is basically "how good are you at cramming a bunch of relatively arbitrary information into your brain and regurgitating it in a high pressure, timed scenario". That is a kind of intelligence, but there are very few occupations where that kind of intelligence is useful. Lawyers and doctors. Both the "intensely study something rather uninteresting" and "perform under high stress and time demand" are specif…

But they are linked. Studies have shown a very high correlation. One outlier doesn't change the high correlation.

Re: A review of correlations between big five personality types and life outcomes

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well then it shouldn't be used as main point of your argument

I think you are confusing a relevant but worthless data point for something of value. I guess there are people that attach emotional significance to such things, but it’s just some number that made a valid argument. If I don’t care and it’s my number why do you or anybody else care? Why should I not use this number to make a valid argument?

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Re: A review of correlations between big five personality types and life outcomes

#134
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Articles like this answer the question, "what if 1920s eugenicists got hold of 1980s magazine relationship tests?" The scary thing is a lot of commercial "people analytics" systems marketed to HR departments, lenders, and government agencies are little more than dressed up relationship tests from 1980s magazines. https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/talks/MIT-STS-AI-snake...

If you know the tests are snake oil, is it ethical to give the "right" answers to get a job?

Related to this, often I see a survey question along the lines of say, "which cup do you think would hold more water" with one that looks like it'd hold a lot more than the other. I'm never sure whether to answer with the meta-analysis of the fact that it's a survey question included in my answer.

That is, if I saw the two cups in my example naturally I'd say the obvious one holds more water, but often there'd be no point in putting it as a survey question if the obvious answer was the case. Therefore I'm almost sure the correct answer is the seemingly wrong one.

So I put that as the answer and get it right. But for whoever's running the survey, I'm probably messing up their results by meta-analysing the questions.

Re: A review of correlations between big five personality types and life outcomes

#135
post #16

not personality trait obviously, but in terms of success IQ probably matters more than big 5. I think personality can be improved or changed though effort but intelligence cannot. Someone who is introverted can make an effort to be extroverted in situations where it matters.

I’m just amazed that we’re still happy to condense one of the most complex phenomena, if not *the* most complex phenomenon that we were aware of into a single scalar performance value.

IQ tests don't do that. They give you different scores for verbal etc.

It's useful to put it into one dimension though because all those different scores are quite correlated. A well functioning brain is usually generally just good at many different things.

Re: A review of correlations between big five personality types and life outcomes

#136
post #134
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you know the tests are snake oil, is it ethical to give the "right" answers to get a job?

Related to this, often I see a survey question along the lines of say, "which cup do you think would hold more water" with one that looks like it'd hold a lot more than the other. I'm never sure whether to answer with the meta-analysis of the fact that it's a survey question included in my answer. That is, if I saw the two cups in my example naturally I'd say the obvious one holds more water, but often there'd be no…

I don't know if this question is an example, but people intentionally include "obvious" questions in surveys to check whether people are actually paying attention to the survey. There's a name for these, I just don't recall it at the moment—which shows you I don't have any survey-design experience myself :).

Re: A review of correlations between big five personality types and life outcomes

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out SMPY - here's an image of their results showing that academic output, patents, tenure, income continues to increase well beyond IQ 135. Details in the later links. https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4b8ThyfDgzs/U29nQEBAQTI/AAAAAAAAE... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Study_of_Mathematically_Precoc... https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/ The obvious question is, if IQ (or whatever SAT is measuring) is irrelevant, why is it…

Some amount of test prep is surely helpful in terms of understanding the test format and strategies, but it does seem (almost?) obvious that the SAT is actually measuring something other than test prep. NB: SMPY qualifications for at least the early cohorts of the study are “before 13” (so, 12 or younger).

[deleted]

Re: A review of correlations between big five personality types and life outcomes

#138
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you know the tests are snake oil, is it ethical to give the "right" answers to get a job?

I would say yes, but do you want the job at the place that is giving you snake oil?

I want a job at a place where I can noodle around with all day, but I'll settle for one that asks me to actually ship stuff, and pays the bills.

Whether or not their HR department is ran by a licensed phrenologist is a distant second concern.

Re: A review of correlations between big five personality types and life outcomes

#139
post #20

I think a lot of this analysis is tautological -- meaning that when you boil it down, you're just saying that things are as you have defined them to be. For instance, take a Big Five trait such as agreeableness. How do we know that a person is agreeable? Because we define agreeableness in a certain way and then measure the degree to which someone conforms to the definition. If that measurement includes questions such…

> If that measurement includes questions such as, "Do others find you easy to get along with?" then of course there's going to be a negative correlation with loneliness, because you've essentially defined it that way.

Lack of agreeableness may drive others away, but if disageeable people also want less socialization, they might not be more lonely than agreeable people.

I personal think I'm pretty agreeable, but it would take a lot for me to feel lonely, so even if I were very disagreeable, I imagine I'd still have enough people around to suit me.

Re: A review of correlations between big five personality types and life outcomes

#140
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google hires no one within 1SD of the Avg IQ? This I find hard to believe.

for technical postitions, i am sure IQs cluser around 125-140

I find it interesting that people are willing to invent data on the spot to qualify a bias.
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