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

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

#141

Post by tikhonj »

acituan wrote: post #124
vlovich123 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My analogy to humorism was not to imply that there’s no empirical evidence at all here. Just that the field of psychology has continually struggled to actually develop testable hypotheses that lead to scientific theories. There’s a giant chasm between “I have a signal” and “here’s what that signal means”. You can’t start out with a data set, pick out some signals and then say what they mean. That’s scientific theory…

You seem to be conflating psychology the science vs psychotherapy the practice. The latter approximates engineering and producing real life results takes precedence over proving things from first principles. Just like with medicine, you don't categorically reject medications even though it can't always explain the mechanisms of action fully (yet). Big tech doesn't hold off on making billion dollar business decisions…

> Big tech doesn't hold off on making billion dollar business decisions based on the same techniques either.

I've seen how large companies make ≈$X0 million decisions and probably $X00 million decisions and I suspect $ billion decisions aren't treated fundamentally differently. I wouldn't use that as evidence for how to make decisions well.

My current theory is that companies are successful not because they consistently make specific tactical or even strategic decisions well but because (through design or evolution) they are resilient systems that can weather surprisingly poor decision making at all levels.

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

#142

Post by austincheney »

fighterpilot wrote: post #132
kortex wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If those studies don’t separate preparation from raw performance they only suggest a self-reinforcing bias different from capability. Any correlation then is purely anecdotal.

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

#143

Post by eCa »

toast0 wrote: post #139
jawns wrote: 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 wo…

Quite a leap from ”I’m agreeable but prefers to be alone” to ”disagreeable people prefers to be more alone than agreeable people”.

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

#144

Post by rkk3 »

paulpauper wrote: post #73
rkk3 wrote: 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

Top 2-3% of IQ seems very high... Remember everyone with IQ above 100 is above average and like you said in your other post, it is for the most part a threshold/satisfying criteria.

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

#145

Post by jokoon »

jawns wrote: 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…

I'm often skeptical about those things, because they try to measure, but those measure are based on a definition of vocabulary, which is difficult to define.

Personality is vague. It's pretty common knowledge that the brain is a complex machine and it's quite difficult to distillate some sort of evaluation, metric or measure for something that obviously has a million or billions ways to be measured.

It's already hard or difficult to treat psychiatric illness, so evaluating personality seems like an odd quest.

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

#146

Post by ZoomZoomZoom »

doggodaddo78 wrote: post #40

I need more emotional stability (inverse of neuroticism) and less conscientiousness. Fine-tune your agreeableness to suit income or popularity, as needed. I wonder what a rich, intelligent artist's traits look like. :)

>I wonder what a rich, intelligent artist's traits look like. :)

Unfortunately, that's a "chose 2" situation. :)

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

#147

Post by vlovich123 »

acituan wrote: post #124
vlovich123 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My analogy to humorism was not to imply that there’s no empirical evidence at all here. Just that the field of psychology has continually struggled to actually develop testable hypotheses that lead to scientific theories. There’s a giant chasm between “I have a signal” and “here’s what that signal means”. You can’t start out with a data set, pick out some signals and then say what they mean. That’s scientific theory…

You seem to be conflating psychology the science vs psychotherapy the practice. The latter approximates engineering and producing real life results takes precedence over proving things from first principles. Just like with medicine, you don't categorically reject medications even though it can't always explain the mechanisms of action fully (yet). Big tech doesn't hold off on making billion dollar business decisions…

It’s remarkable how similar this is to the argument that an acupuncturist will make is. The modern pharmaceutical industry in many instances has the same issues by the way. Lots of drugs that have questionable efficacy at best.

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

#148

Post by wizzwizz4 »

periheli0n wrote: post #131
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't see how you could get a prior over this without some really dubious assumptions. Plus, it's not what GGP described.

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

#149

Post by TameAntelope »

paulpauper wrote: post #70
wombatmobile wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If IQ is important, maybe it's just that intelligent people know how to take personality tests. What even is intelligence? I know that IQ is what IQ tests measure, but what is intelligence? People say my dog is intelligent, but only in response to her displays of obedience to my commands, I've noticed. I silently translate their comment about intelligence to mean "your dog is obedient." Does an IQ test measure what…

I am sure someone with an IQ of 130 probably has better luck understanding coding than someone with an IQ of 100. To say that IQ is ill-defined and of no predictive power, is wrong.

That's just it, does IQ denote ability to rationally think? Can you be highly irrational and also have a high IQ, because if so then I'd argue that the 130 IQ person would struggle more than the 100 IQ person if the latter were better able to think rationally.

We might assume that IQ translates directly to ability to reason through a problem, but that may not be the case. An 8 lane highway is useless if you're riding a skateboard.

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

#150

Post by vmception »

ghaff wrote: post #51
mathrando wrote: post #43

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...

Or Myers–Briggs, which is a lot older. The main useful thing about this sort of thing, including the more modern Tilt 365 for example, is that it can be a useful exercise in helping people understand that the way they think about and approach the world differs from how others do. Years ago, I remember a book (Tog on Interface) that had a chapter which discussed how Apple engineers tested on MBTI versus the general po…

Myers Briggs is astrology for people that scoff at astrology

I will code switch between star signs and personality acronyms to get in your pants and assign zero weight to either

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