A review of correlations between big five personality types and life outcomes
dynomight.net
dynomight.net
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 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.
I am the author of Correlated.org, which commits many different types of statistical errors for humor's sake, so this leaps out at me. By the way, for a surprisingly vast number of things, agreeableness is quite predictive. Food preferences, public policy positions, and even willingness to answer poll questions :)
The Big Five are a statistically-derived groupings of phrases that are reasonably stable when measured from different angles. I think it would be fair to call it a "modest initial result" if compared to the physical sciences, or "wildly successful" if compared to basically anything prior that came out of the social sciences. There are some quite reasonable critiques listed on the wikipedia page, such as a lack of modeling theory, or only accounting for a portion of personality differences, or arguments for a slightly different number of factors, etc. That said, it seems to be one of the first actually solid findings that ever came out of the social sciences. It's like the whole field has been flailing around, swept down a river in the dark, and for the first time we found a stone that has a bit of purchase, even if it's covered with moss and slippery.
That being said, it's much much harder to develop measures when you rely on other measures of the same type to validate them, which is where personality testing is right now.
Thank you for the correction.
It's a much, much better method for designing and analysing questionnaires, and it is the foundation for all standardised testing (SAT, MCAT etc).
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...
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 population. He went to discuss implications for how it was easier for engineers to have mental models for how systems operated than users. Was this a correct explanation based on MBTI? Who knows. But it was a useful reminder in this case that your users may not be like you.
I will code switch between star signs and personality acronyms to get in your pants and assign zero weight to either
You charmer, you.
I dont lie about my astrology signs or myer briggs result
I judge which one will likely help create an intimate consensual scenario and judge when to avoid criticizing either school of thought as disagreement is usually counterproductive to a consensual reproductive scenario
Pick your battles wisely
Out of even more adaptive curiosity, how do you read that as lying?
I guess it comes from the goal you are trying to achieve.
But I’ll probably be knowledgeable about the value system
We’re on to love languages now too right
Controversial, but also true, is that I get the same response trying to debunk diversity hiring etc. because I happen to be a white, straight male. I am also practically blind in one eye and grew up poor, but I refuse to play the victimhood game or even agree to that frame to win an argument. Also I don’t want to get into the pros and cons of that topic in this thread as that’ll inevitably be a train wreck as always, but I just want to point out how frustrating it is to “lose” an argument because of who you are, not what you actually say. Also, for the diversity people, it’s super insulting to essentially suggest “you’re only disagreeing to protect your own race”. I honestly think the appropriate response is to tell them to fuck off after they bring up your race, gender, sexuality, etc. in an argument.
I agree though and simply say its not my trading strategy.
But, seriously, IMO, to the extent that technical analysis "works," it's probably just exploiting short term momentum. Momentum strategies have been shown to generate alpha. Other than that, you'd probably be just as well off reading tea leaves and goat entrails to guide your trading strategy.
Whether or not their HR department is ran by a licensed phrenologist is a distant second concern.
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.
One or ours was deliberately set up so that prospect hires applying for a leadership position would end up with very, very, little in their empathy score if they chose answers that sound like the “right” ones for a leadership position. It was done to catch people off guard in their next interview, and see how they handled getting shown a result they’d very likely not agree with.
HR departments know these things are bullshit. They know people game the systems, exactly like people practice for the coding interview. The test and the results are often extremely irrelevant to anyone getting hired, it’s how people handle their results that’s important.
The entire branch of team-building/personality matching/management consulting/management training/management network facilitating is a fat unnecessary cow that enterprise organisations will never get rid of because they are very good at being “people skills” and positioning themselves with top management.
After a year of lockdowns, where they’ve been completely unable to execute their regular function, their absence have left no mark on our organisation though.
It’s just easier to get there when you use a disguised relationship tests from 1980ies magazines. Not only does it touch on relevant areas, most people that you’d use the HR resources on secretly love taking those things and then talking about themselves.
As with most things, it can obviously go wrong or get used in the wrong situations. HR is a department that’s there to help managers, but they really shouldn’t waste their resources testing people for a position as a software developer. If your company is doing that, something went wrong. Maybe HR found a way to keep themselves busy, or you’re not bolstering a management culture or people who can make hiring related decisions without consulting HR.
But I guess this means HR shouldnt skill-test anyone. We d all agree they shouldn't test a racecar driver, a CEO, a mathematician.
But the guy saying that probably doesnt work: HR never test anyone. They handle the process. He may be confusing it with wrong job posting that people attribute to HR (like N years xp in N-5 years old tech) which are usually the product of idiotic managers, not HR who doesnt give a fig what your team needs as long as you express it to them.
Maybe we have different ways of defining things, or maybe my English isn’t good enough to convey the meaning.
But isn’t HR handling the process of personality testing, HR testing people? When we utilise personality testing, a HR consultant actually tests the candidates. It’s their test, they spend millions developing it and you have to be certified to perform it.
It’s not an insignificant amount of resources you put into the process. Not only do you take up HR resources, the team that is helping you recruit is also going to need to spend time going over the results with HR and the candidate.
In my optics that is an unnecessary waste of resources. Not only doesn’t the process really show you anything team-related, you should frankly be capable of judging people from the conversations you have with them just as well.
The in-depth personality stuff only gets relevant when the people you hire have to manage other people.
I agree that the battery of tests used should not be the same in every case. It should be tailored to the situation and to the position you are hiring for.
> Not only do you take up HR resources, the team that is helping you recruit is also going to need to spend time going over the results with HR and the candidate.
I have second-hand experience that this can be made very streamlined and does not take much time at all. Especially when you have a large number of prospective candidates and will not be able to see them all in person, a pre-filtering done by a skilled HR person is better than a random draw.
Of course, there are limitations to this kind of approach and there's been a lot of research and refining done on top of this—not being an expert, I'm not familiar with it—but the core of the Big Five model is observational, not tautological.
So this isn't tautological in the way that you've described, though it is certainly related to the way human beings describe each other and the way that instantiates in human language.
Source 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_hypothesis
Source 2: I'm a psychologist and did research in this area
You might have Personality Descriptive Adjective X that is found to cluster into what we call a Big Five trait.
But Adjective X has its own definition, and it's likely that the tautology (at least insofar as these life satisfaction correlations are concerned) happens at that level.
Essentially you come to a point where extracting another value isn't explaining much more variance or producing a factor that's meaningful (e.g., two items of conscientiousness with negative wording are the entire new "factor" and only take variance explained from 80% to 82%).
https://www.theanalysisfactor.com/factor-analysis-how-many-f...
More generally, all of those metrics are pretty fluffy (the scree plot is probably the best, as it doesn't give you a p-value).
In order to actually do this right, you need multiple studies and CFA, but the standard in the field is to refit your exploratory model as a CFA on the original dataset, which is almost certainly causing overfitting in most cases.
Fwiw, my understanding is that most psychologists believe that with further study, these categories will map to actual functioning of the brain and nerve systems. For example, "Neuroticism" will somehow map to the excitability of certain nerve systems and "Agreeableness" will somehow map to functioning of our mirror and mentalizing systems. "Conscientiousness" will map to inhibiting functions, "Openness" will map to approach/flee type emotional functions, and "Extraversion" will map to systems like dopamine release on securing rewards for behavior.
Instead, they literally ask people hundreds of questions of the type:
"To what extent would you consider yourself to be [adjective]?" (0 - 'not at all' to 5 - 'complete')
Then they factor analyze the results to see which adjectives tend to be highly related to each other. Factor analysis builds on correlation to find shared variation among large groups of indicator variables.
So it is related to how people think of the adjectives and what they mean, but it is not the case that we are just lumping definitions together or "saying the same thing in different words" in the way of a tautology. Instead, what we're saying is that "Most of these personality adjectives mostly mean the same thing. Here's the thing they all mostly mean. If humans in all languages have tons of words that mostly mean this common thing, maybe this common thing is significant and worthy of study."
Regarding life satisfaction, the sense that one finds their life satisfactory and "would change nothing" (one of the items in the Satisfaction with Life Scale that was most likely used to measure it) doesn't show up in those other traits in any major way. In fact, to the extent that a description of the self is related to a world-view, belief or other external factor, it will never be a tautology, because a self-view and other-view or world-view will never share a common definition or tautology by virtue of the self-other distinction.
The big problem with these results (and god knows I've analysed enough of them) is that the extent that they map to other characteristics measured without surveys is pretty much unknown.
If you want to create a new measure of extraversion, then you use the older methods (i.e. other surveys), and this only really tells you that the new measure correlates with the old.
I vaguely recall Eysenck doing physiological tests for extraversion/introversion which would avoid this problem, but I'm not aware of any more recent research in this area (mind you, I've been out of the field for a decade now).
Modern personality theory DOES. Personality theory uses a variety of techniques to show that a construct is internally consistent and related to real-world indicators. If independent people can view a video or a person and they reliably rate that entity similarly (inter-rater reliability), we can say with some certainty that there is something there. Relating a construct like this to a variety of real-world outcomes allows us to ascertain its relationship to the world. This evidence is messy and not nearly as solid as what's found in the harder sciences, but your dismissal of the modern statistics of questionnaire-based measurement does a very well-researched field of inquiry a huge disservice.
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 101. You build a hypothetical model and then design experiments to test those theories. It’s not me doing the field a disservice. The practitioners have consistently and repeatedly done bad science and statistics. I’ll be more supportive once the field actually starts producing falsifiable theories that are supported by evidence and the practitioners are better at calling out their peers.
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.
Acupuncture, which is having someone dancing around you while touching you, is like everything: find something cheaper and more efficient to solve the same problems and we wont see it anymore.
The problem still remains of how the physical measurements (even assuming we could measure them perfectly, which we definitely can't) relate to the internal experience.
Any real theory of psychology/neuroscience needs to be able to explain that, and currently I'm not aware of any that do.
> Psychology and psychiatry really do struggle to demonstrate statistically meaningful results behind most therapies (CBT is perhaps a notable exception, although even there results can be mixed)
So it's incredibly difficult to do good studies of therapy, because there is no simple placebo. All of the research I've seen suggests that there's huge amount of provider-level variance, which swamps the theoretically meaningful defences. I would suggest that this is because we don't really have a good understanding of how to interrogate our own (or others) psyches, which is definitely not something that neuroscience will help with (given the current state of the field, at least).
In fact, they liked it so little that they invented Procrustean rotation so that they could make the factors come out the "correct" way.
Once I discovered that, I paid a lot less attention to the Big 5.
Also, I haven't checked the source papers, but that all blue stuff could come from a general tendency to agree with the questions/put a positive spin on that. I do know that not all personality measures are balanced on positive vs negative questions, to remove this bias (life satisfaction methods are almost certainly not balanced in this 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.
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.
For example, that conscientiousness (aka diligence/organization) correlates more positively than extraversion with Job Income but less positively with Life Satisfaction and negatively with Popularity.
Agreeableness having a light negative correlation with Income and Intelligence is also thought-provoking and not at all tautological.
I'm not sure what's the point of this observation.
This is the case with every term.
How do we know someone is a murderer, a cry-baby, a thief, a chef, or any trait X?
Because "we define X in a certain way and then measure the degree to which someone conforms to the definition"
Especially in relation to “neurological disorders” like ADHD. Where some people blame their ADHD for their behavior. Or basically anything that has to do with personality. It is clearly as you say tautological. You have a certain personality because you behave in a certain way, you don’t behave in a certain way cause you have a certain personality.
But then you have the fact that earlier personality can be used to predict future personality and future behavior. It is not causal but it is predictive.
Some people call that causal people in social science. I think that is twisting the definition of “causal”.
Some people define the self in such a way that free will can’t exist and others define the self in a way so that free will must exist ie. It could not possibly not exist.
Evolution is likely selecting for, eg, people who have children at a certain ratio of introverted-extroverted.
Introverted, disagreeable, high-contentious types make, for example, great scientists. A population (call it A) that produces a reasonable number of such people is at a huge advantage compared to the alternative that only produces extroverted agreeable types (call them B).
Population B will be more competitive at breeding, but population A will win any conflict with B because they'll have a bunch of weirdos in the back room producing a lot of high quality science (a classic stereotype with some foundation in truth).
Note that men are much more likely (something like 4x) to be "completely homosexual" compared to women [0]. I'm betting this is because having a few men who opt out of the race to pass on their genes and focus on other stuff is a massive advantage to the society that hosts them. Look how much of a force gay men have been in culture for example.
Locally catastrophic for breeding, globally optimal for society. The equilibrium isn't for all offspring to maximise their chance of breeding. The optimum is for the community to thrive.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_sexual_orienta...
In a nutshell - "The problem with group selection is that for a whole group to get a single trait, it must spread through the whole group first by regular evolution... a group where altruism was universal would indeed outcompete a group where every creature acted in its own interest, so group selection might seem feasible; but a mixed group of altruists and non-altruists would be vulnerable to cheating by non-altruists within the group, so group selection would collapse."
Various combinations of medications, prescribed and self-selected, have failed. It wasn't exhaustive exactly but I would say that it was a good survey of the field.
Memorizing quite a lot of detail about people helps in making you seem engaged, but there's a fine line (past a certain point, if you confess to remembering whatever counts as "too much," it becomes "creepy"), and it still hasn't affected the base.
Self-talk, acting, improv -- it increases the fidelity of the emulation but it's still emulation.
At the end of the day, other people say "hello" and I have failed the initiative check, and am pondering what exactly do I say back to them, and they've already gone by.
A remarkably stable trait for me.
Personally, I really don't like this differentiation between introverts and extroverts because I don't see where I fit in on this scale. Reducing so many hard to define traits like empathy, compassion, charisma, social competence, emotional intelligence, etc. and all kind of personal experiences and habits to a single binary label doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
Are you an introvert if you don't like to be around most people in your current environment but can't stop talking for hours when you're around people that you actually like?
Do you become introvert after an unfortunate series of events, which create serious trust issues and result in you staying at home more often instead of constantly going out like in the past?
Are you an extrovert when you can't be alone because then you will experiences constant FOMO, can't stop yourself from ruminating or need constant approvement from others and socializing whenever you can is your only coping mechanism.
Are you a real extrovert if you get along really good with a lot of strangers on a daily basis as part of your job but prefer to spend most of your free time alone reading, painting etc.?
Sometimes it looks almost like a self-fullfilling-prophecy when someone labels themself this way.
I once was sort of compelled to take a Myers-Briggs test and I found it utterly flawed. So much of one’s personality depends on the contact and environment, yet Myers-Briggs wants to force you into one type.
Making things way too simple. But maybe simple is what was sought here rather than really resolving personality.
That might even make sense but then it’s not a description of personality, but of context-dependent behaviour. Only useful within a defined context.
It is based on a massive amount of research looking at clusters of personality adjectives found in dozens of languages that tend to cluster along five dimensions. And the same five clusters are found in virtually all languages (sometimes to include a 6th cluster often called "honesty/humility").
And to your point about types, this system doesn't assign types to people, but instead places them on a continuous dimension that is considered to be much more useful.
And to your point about complexity, the 5 dimensions are higher level structures. Within each dimension is a branching tree of complexity that is where the current work lies.
Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
I can see how a continuous scale can already fix a few issues. However, isn’t it still too simplistic to say “personality feature X correlates with real-life success measure Y?”
Take for example “Openness”. It’s not hard to imagine how the very same person can be very open with one group of people, but act totally differently in another group.
Is Openness then really a feature of personality? Or maybe rather a description of the social behaviour of one person in a specific context?
This is a great question! And it touches on what's call the "person-situation" debate, first popularized by Walter Michel[1]. Essentially there was a major debate about whether traits were a thing or we should just be focused on context-specific behavior. Mischel believed that traits weren't useful, and situations ruled.
In many ways this debate has been resolved by the "person as a density distribution" [2]. People do vary a lot within, and that variation is vitally important. However, their average or "set point" upon which they vary is also important and predictive.
When we talk about the correlation between a trait and some external marker, we are only looking at correlations with averages or set-points, which as you mention is only a limited picture of that person, but it is still useful and valuable to look at. For example, I'm a fairly open person. This means that on average I'm more open in more situations. And this is predictive. It's also important to note that this only loosely predicts what I'll do in any particular situation or at any particular timepoint.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person%E2%80%93situation_debat...
[2] https://personality-project.org/revelle/syllabi/classreading...
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 make this practical ;)
Lest this be misunderstood, note that "Openness" in this context is not about being honest. It is short for "Openness to Experience". Roughly, it's about creativity and curiosity.
(I'm not particularly invested in either model, but it is somewhat cute that the author of both pieces is the same.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Hi...
But it would be total nonsense to conclude about personality traits from a self-taken test.
In particular, each of the traits is measured on a separate spectrum—none of them are treated as binary the way M-B does, and they don't seek to pigeonhole you based on your levels of the different traits into some oversimplified bucket.
That is the reason that modern tests like Big Five did away with the labels, because people were incapable to reason beyond them and kept making dumb assumptions like "He scored introvert so he must hate parties or I scored introvert the first time but extrovert the second (a potential 1% difference between the labels without the percentages associated to them) so the test is crap".
This doesn't fit well with my mental model of how Myers Briggs works (regardless of the veracity of Myers Briggs).
As I understand it: Myers Briggs maps to the Jungian cognitive functions[0] and the side that you fall on the J/P dichotomy will invert these.
An INTJ would be: Introverted Intuition, Extraverted Thinking, Introverted Feeling, Extraverted Sensing
An INTP would be: Introverted Thinking, Extraverted Intuition, Introverted Sensing, Extraverted Feeling
Getting near the 50% mark on the J/P aspect appears to show low confidence in any part of the model
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungian_cognitive_functions
It was literally concocted by two persons without scientific method or context. It’s fiction. Some fiction mirrors life quite well, but that does not turn it into a scientific tool.
The only time Myers-Briggs has some utility is as a facilitation tool when a consultant needs to convince a roomfull of people that diverse teams are good, and that cognitive diversity is an asset and what it might look like. I.e. it’s a usefull proxy for a scientific measure when we’ve been brainwashed to trust only high-modernist fantasies and have no space for actual humanist rumination.
As I've grown older, I've developed a theory about why people like the zodiac sign, Myers-Briggs, blood type personalities and all that other crap: * Sense of belonging - wanting to belong to an in-group * Understanding oneself - these categorizations let you explain your personality really quickly, if not really in depth * Avoiding responsibility for themselves - instead of recognizing your flaws, it's easier to say "well I'm a Libra, what did you expect?"
I can understand the need for the first two, but that last point always makes me angry.
Someone fresh from college might be introverted and on the left political spectrum because he has no money, but to be successful he might get extroverted and when he has much money, he might get more on the right political spectrum.
How can something which basically assumes that people don't change get so popular?! People change all the time, personality changes all the time.
Modern personality theory in no way assumes that personality doesn't change over time. It finds instead that personality tends to be "somewhat stable over time" which means that personality doesn't vary massively from week to week or month to month but can definitely shift across the lifespan. In fact, here's a large study looking at exactly that (though cross-sectional which means that many effects could be a function of age cohorts rather than actual change).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2562318/
Regarding your hypothetical introverted recent college grad, these kinds of shifts can and do happen, but massive shifts in personality appear to be quite rare. What's more, modern work in the area has found that "within-person" variability is much greater than "between-persons" variability meaning that as individuals we express a wide range of behaviors. For example, I might be more extraverted at work and more introverted among friends or vice versa, showing internal variation. That said, we can talk about a person's average level of a trait like extraversion and that average is meaningful and predictive.
As to your point, both kinds of change can and do happen, but changing our behavioral approach to life tends to be gradual and slow for most people.
If you'll permit me to speculate a bit:
I do clinical work as well, and I'd say that therapy produces some personality change if done long enough, but it's not a massive shift in most cases, though even small changes can make a big difference over time.
Unfortunately, trauma and hardship can also have a big impact on people's personality and average behavior. Going to war or prison or suffering great loss can have a big impact.
Do you have a “favorite set of constructs”?
I really like the Jaak Panksepp's affective neuroscience view of emotion systems and Paul Gilbert's work on social safeness as an often overlooked emotion system.
Interestingly, emotions can be measured and viewed very similarly to personality traits (really the propensity to experience a particular emotion) and in fact positive emotionality forms a subcomponent (sometimes called an 'aspect') of extroversion and negative emotionality more or less IS neuroticism.
Different traits can change over time, some are easier to change than others, they are also skewed if the individual suffers from acute mental health issues such as depression.
Concienciousness is the easiest to change, via intervention, but takes a very long period of time. We tend to naturally become more conciencious as we get older.
Openess is the hardest to change I believe, it's also a predictor of creativity and IQ, IQ being impossible to improve currently.
The teenage/developmental opinion swings are a result of life experience and information gathered about surroundings rather than personality. Personality is mostly established by age 6. Lou
Interestingly, those people don't seem to do particularly well in the SAT. Perhaps their abilities are "unlocked" to the fullest only after they get into college and get a chance to make independent decisions.
Or maybe the SAT is just a shitty test.
The real problem is that not all valuable paths can come to the same bottleneck.
Med student? Well, the SAT might be a good indicator of how successful you'll be at completing a medical program in the US. Same thing for law.
Are you the creative type? Then the SAT probably won't be as indicative of your future success.
That's rather impressive, but I would double-check those numbers.
For example, which IQ test? Was it recently updated? IQ tests are adjusted by as many as 10 points every 10 years [1]. Have you double verified with another test? How did you prepare for each?
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?
Both the "intensely study something rather uninteresting" and "perform under high stress and time demand" are specific kinds of intelligence, and I happen to know many intelligent folks who are expressly bad at it. They don't "test well". Anecdotally, diligent study and fast-testing are anti-correlated in many of these smart folks.
What? Most of the SAT is evaluating high school-level math, writing, and reading skills. It's not like they're asking you to memorize historical dates or names or poems or formulas. Maybe the relatively narrow part of the test on vocabulary falls into this category, but even those words are almost entirely things you'll just pick up if you like reading books. And, now that I'm looking into it, only 10 out of 52 questions in the reading section are even about vocabulary [1]. You can skip 9 of them and still get a 700 on reading/writing [2]. Assuming you get an 800 on math, that's a 98th percentile total score and a 90th percentile on reading/writing alone [3], with almost no vocabulary prep.
I agree about the high pressure aspect, there doesn't seem to be a good way around that.
[1] https://www.kaptest.com/study/sat/whats-tested-on-the-sat-vo...
[2] https://blog.prepscholar.com/how-many-questions-can-you-skip...
[3] https://blog.prepscholar.com/sat-percentiles-and-score-ranki...
Even this is saying too much. I know someone who literally did two or three practice tests and got just shy of a 2400 (he got every q right and lost ten pts for his essay). There's nothing on the SAT that's difficult enough to need prep for a high school junior, with the possible exception of the permutation/combination qs.
Though note that this leaves a massive hole for those who are doing math at middle-school levels, which is true of a shocking fraction of the student population.
My impression is conscientious people work within the system and don't toe the line.
edit: disclosure, I am highly unconscientious, didn't finish uni etc.
Thanks.
Don’t get me started on “flammable vs inflammable” vs “accurate vs inaccurate” ;)
Being 'sufficiently smart' - plus - being organized, diligent, applying yourself consistently, will probably get you better grades than being a disorganized genius.
If everyone had the same IQ, then University grades would be actually a really, really good measure of raw conscientiousness.
Conscientious can almost be better described as 'consistent', 'doing what you say you're gong to do', 'being responsible'.
I think you might be hinting at the right thing ...
.. but 'weighing evidence in a very highly deliberative, judicial fashion' - might not be the best example of that.
Extolling the Judgment, might even land on the disagreeable side. For example, the Judge who finds a supposed murderer 'not guilty' even with the mobs of people chanting 'guilty' outside the courthouse.
I don't think 'disagreeableness' is necessarily even the right word, it's more like 'will have their own opinion even if it makes them unpopular'.
I almost think that those Big 5 could be reoriented in a way that divides people as those inclined towards populist outcomes vs. those inclined towards judicial, principled, truthful ones.
In the US it's basically what upper middle-class WASP culture is and it sustains a large share of income because it's very good at reproducing itself and managing organisations, it's all the lawyers, and bureaucrats, politicians and administrators and so on, it's all the people who're really good at making schedules.
This reads like an extrovert's life wish list - particularly "popular," but even "happy" and "creative." I disagree that someone who exhibits these characteristics is somehow "better" or is living a better life.
Perceptions of intelligence are variable to practice and preparation if the measure is nonrandomized convergent standardized tests, which is not IQ but is the more accepted assessment of intelligence. IQ only seems to matter up to 135 after which other factors become more dominant in determining success.
I look at it like this, for creative, intellectually demanding work IQ is a necessary but perhaps insufficient condition. You need to be smart to achieve success cause you are competing with other people, so smarter people will have an edge. Google is not hiring people with 90-110 iqs. So having a high IQ is needed to at least be sufficiently proficient in coding, to be considered for a good paying job, but not guarantee you will be hired, but being smart sure helps.
Should I even bother on what's the source of this claim?
> Can You Ever Be Too Smart for Your Own Good? Comparing Linear and Nonlinear Effects of Cognitive Ability on Life Outcomes > Despite a long-standing expert consensus about the importance of cognitive ability for life outcomes, contrary views continue to proliferate in scholarly and popular literature. This divergence of beliefs presents an obstacle for evidence- based policymaking and decision-making in a variety of settings. One commonly held idea is that greater cognitive ability does not matter or is actually harmful beyond a certain point (sometimes stated as > 100 or 120 IQ points). We empirically tested these notions using data from four longitudinal, representative cohort studies comprising 48,558 participants in the United States and United Kingdom from 1957 to the present. We found that ability measured in youth has a positive association with most occupational, educational, health, and social outcomes later in life. Most effects were characterized by a moderate to strong linear trend or a practically null effect (mean R2 range = .002–.256). Nearly all nonlinear effects were practically insignificant in magnitude (mean incremental R2 = .001) or were not replicated across cohorts or survey waves. We found no support for any downside to higher ability and no evidence for a threshold beyond which greater scores cease to be beneficial. Thus, greater cognitive ability is generally advantageous—and virtually never detrimental. https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2021-brown.pdf
It is most explanatory at the low end; Cognitively Challenged. Elsewhere it has a correlation it is just not as significant, which is not in conflict with your link.
If you tested all the Children in the US you aren't going to be able to accurately rule out 84% of them from professional careers by IQ.
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 so predictive of lifetime academic output?
Also, people try to attack the SAT as nothing more than test prep - but I don't think that argument works well because it supposes you can produce kids who score 700 on the math SAT before age 13; such a training program has never been observed.
NB: SMPY qualifications for at least the early cohorts of the study are “before 13” (so, 12 or younger).
> Can You Ever Be Too Smart for Your Own Good? Comparing Linear and Nonlinear Effects of Cognitive Ability on Life Outcomes
> Despite a long-standing expert consensus about the importance of cognitive ability for life outcomes, contrary views continue to proliferate in scholarly and popular literature. This divergence of beliefs presents an obstacle for evidence- based policymaking and decision-making in a variety of settings. One commonly held idea is that greater cognitive ability does not matter or is actually harmful beyond a certain point (sometimes stated as > 100 or 120 IQ points). We empirically tested these notions using data from four longitudinal, representative cohort studies comprising 48,558 participants in the United States and United Kingdom from 1957 to the present. We found that ability measured in youth has a positive association with most occupational, educational, health, and social outcomes later in life. Most effects were characterized by a moderate to strong linear trend or a practically null effect (mean R2 range = .002–.256). Nearly all nonlinear effects were practically insignificant in magnitude (mean incremental R2 = .001) or were not replicated across cohorts or survey waves. We found no support for any downside to higher ability and no evidence for a threshold beyond which greater scores cease to be beneficial. Thus, greater cognitive ability is generally advantageous—and virtually never detrimental.
They could just be out to sell books though, too; I don't have a strong opinion either way.
Sure, a smart introvert can learn how to act like an extrovert. But this will never be natural to him and will cause an additional cognitive load.
“All models are wrong; some models are useful.”
There's a single component responsible for almost half of the difference: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)
>It is a variable that summarizes positive correlations among different cognitive tasks, reflecting the fact that an individual's performance on one type of cognitive task tends to be comparable to that person's performance on other kinds of cognitive tasks.
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.
"How you answer this survey correlates this well to outcomes" is perhaps useful, but binning answers into personality types with common names is questionable.
It all seems to be a little bit too far down the road of searching for things to name and classify.
The easiest example of this across many species is homosexuality. As it seems obvious that it would reduce an individuals chances of having offspring. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13674-evolution-myths...
There is the added complexity that some positive traits are tied to negative traits. Meaning if the gene stops getting selected the positive trait goes away with the negative one.
And then there is culture. It is clear humans have become the dominant species of our planet (at least for now) and it is our culture and the technology it supports that enable this.
Attacking the big five would be a fruitless endeavor, the tests have obvious substance and are reducible to 5 factors, can't do anything about that.
Edit: Why would Reimersholme's comment be buried? Neuroticism is what it's usually called in Big Five. [1][2]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroticism
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
The personality traits of famous historical people are well established and widely available online. I have no idea how accurate they are, but they do fulfill their role as easily recognizable stereotypes. In any case the author probably used a publicly available dataset and didn't just make it up.
What's worse is how the article tries to look at financial success, happiness, popularity, reproductive success, etc. Those things are rather subjective, and depends on philosophy and politics.
It only looks at shades of good or bad. There is no nuance. Comparing people and putting them in categories is pointless.
We can do no such damn thing! This analysis completely conflates natural selection and sexual selection, and ignores the role of genetic drift.
Taken together this tends to indicate that the overall life outcome correlations are as usual as likely to mislead as inform. What makes more sense is to see how individuals match with roles and tasks and how diverse individuals can cooperate to make the most of each of their best talents.
Fine-tune your agreeableness to suit income or popularity, as needed.
I wonder what a rich, intelligent artist's traits look like. :)
Unfortunately, that's a "chose 2" situation. :)
There are also temperament groups, which are NF, SP, NT (HackerNews' audience...), and SJ. Generally you don't want streams to cross here with the type of information people of each temperament want to consume and the time perspective they prefer (past, present, future), though there is some overlap.
Some would say it's a good idea to get at type opposites by mirroring the functions, e.g. ENFJ (FeNiSeTi-FiNeSiTe) would be functionally opposite to ESTJ (TeSiNeFi-TiSeNiFe). So these two type groups would tend to want to repress' the other's perceptive and decision-making functionality. The same would not necessarily be as true, or true in the same way, with e.g. ISTP and ENFJ, which some would consider a potentially lovely pairing due to shared function-valuing, meaning that these two opposites will naturally develop toward the other over time, from a developmental perspective.
I think Isabel Briggs-Meyers had her own view of the first four functions' order, which you can read in her book "Gifts Differing". This would also yield a different type of opposite.
Factors that can help on a daily basis actually include routine sleep and diet as well. No carbohydrates in the morning, only fats and proteins.
If IQ is important, maybe it's just that intelligent people know how to take personality tests.
Also why ADHD meds, prescribed legally, are rampant on college campuses.
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 makes good employees?
Does an IQ test measure what makes good employers?
Does an IQ test measure what makes good entertainers?
Does an IQ test measure what makes good leaders?
Does an IQ test measure what makes good entrepreneurs?
Does an IQ test measure what makes good spouses?
Does an IQ test measure what makes good neighbours?
Does an IQ test measure what makes good friends?
If an IQ test could measure some factor that leads to happiness, I might consider that factor to be "intelligence". But the things that make people happy vary on an individual basis, as well as over time and circumstances, so how could that be encapsulated in one static test for everybody?
to me, intelligence is simply the ability to discern (useful) connections between phenomena, basically being able to accurately inter-/extra-polate from observation through time and space, or alternatively, the ability to predict the future (for relatively finite values of future). it's kinda like the derivative of knowledge, and wit is the derivative of intelligence.
an IQ test measures a very narrow slice of that. it doesn't encompass humor, art, or sports/dance (dynamic/kinetic ability) for instance.
with dogs (or other pets), the intelligent part is their ability to parse your alien communications into desired responses, similar to learning a foreign language without an instructor, an interpreter, or a reference available.
I've found the following a fairly good definition:
Efficient cross-domain optimization
In less coded language: the ability to gain more benefit across many areas of value from the same or fewer resources.
Your use of the term "more benefit" is clever because it avoids definition, and cannot be disproven.
If you'd said "more money" or "more power" or "more calories" or "more resources" the notion of benefit could be directly assessed, although different people would assess each proposition differently, some positively, and others negatively, because the value of "more" of anything is circumstantial and a matter of taste.
Sometimes less is more.
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.
Higher intelligence = fast learner + better at joining seemingly unrelated dots.
(IQ is a fuzzy, poorly-measured "quality" that doesn't have a whole lot of meaning other than some interpretation of taking a particular test.)
It does not seems rigorous or scientific at all, and I don't understand how it can be visible here on HN, to be honest...
I can easily say that I DO think the article is rigorous and scientific but then we’d disagree without any insight into what we disagree on.
Let's say I vote to see less article like this one on HN.
This is merely annoying, not enough to warrant a full debunk.