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Comment by wolfgke | Hacker News Reader

> Highly creative people generally rank low on conscientiousness.

Are you sure about that? I would rather assume that highly creative people often rank low on "tolerating bullshit" instead of having a low conscientiousness.

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Usually, that bullshit is tantamount to defrauding the investors by taking salary without creating business value, or screwing over the customers by forcing them to upgrade to a substandard version of the product.

Saying refusing to play along is not “conscientious” is classic corporate double speak.

I’ve definitely similar elsewhere. In fact, the article points out that people that “can’t cut it” at corporate culture often go on to create the best companies.

Conscientiousness can be broken down further into 5 factors: two of which correlate with openness to experience: industriousness and achievement. Creatives tend to be low on the other three: order, dutifulness, and deliberation.

Probably safe to say dealing with other people's bullshit gets in the way of industriousness and achievement and leads to low agreeableness. ;)

Generalizations like those need solid data to back them up. As it stands, it's just pushing a pseudo-psychological narrative.

Explanation for your downvotes: GP's description is not a generalisation or pseudo-psychological, but reflects the current standard model of personality in psychology. http://enwp.org/OCEAN_model

Thanks for the link. Actually, I think the downvotes were somewhat deserved. I wasn't careful enough to set the proper tone of my critique.

In any case, I just wanted to point out here on HN we value those who back up their claims with good data.

You did this. So, thanks.

You may also have been thinking of Myers-Briggs which is pseudo-scientific nonsense and quite worthless given the ease it can be gamed when answering the questions.

I'm pretty sure the big 5 model was developed from data directly, not from a pre-existing theoretical model. I.e. they just made big personality tests and then checked how many factors there seemed to be, and it came out to 5.

The model is not without its fair share of criticisms. Check out this section on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Cr...

How do you know? Do you have solid data to support your statement?

Wow... you nailed it. I was formulating this exact same thought the moment I read this comment. Big companies have so much bullshit the repell creatives.

What is sad, is that there are people who seem to thrive on company politics, gossip, and all the infighting and backstabbing.

We're not all good looking enough to get on Survivor so we play it out in the office.

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