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Comment by austincheney | Hacker News Reader

Conscientiousness is by far the least popular but has the highest income. That is not at all surprising. Objectivity, right and wrong as reflected by a balance of measures, is a rare and unpopular innate personality trait that allows for making micro-decisions many people might find abhorrent, more typically based upon evidence.

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I would say that's almost more disagreeable than conscientious.

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.

Conscientiousness isn't a measure of objectivity, it's a measure of reliability, the capacity to work diligently and adhere to rules. It correlates with income well because we're living in a very institutionalized society that rewards people who adhere to rules and follow expectations.

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.

According to the same chart, conscientious people also seem to perform significantly better in college than everyone else. In the modern world, better GPAs are usually correlated with higher income.

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.

> 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.

For whom?

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.

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.

they are positively correlated. your outlier does not invalidate the relation between the variables.

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 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.

> cramming a bunch of relatively arbitrary information into your brain

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...

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.

The high correlation suggests that both preparation/study and raw intelligence are important in getting a high SAT score. If you sacrifice one of those two things, you'll get a low SAT score. If you have both, you'll get a high score.

> If you sacrifice one of those two things, you'll get a low SAT score. If you have both, you'll get a high score.

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.

Which of those is more important and by how much though? If both are important factors it would necessary to determine that weighted measure before falsely drawing a correlation that is incomplete or biased.

SAT is more "how good AND MOTIVATED are you at cramming a bunch of relatively arbitrary information into your brain"

SAT and IQ are strongly correlated, you are an outlier.

IQ strongly correlates with SAT score, IIRC. If you have a 148 IQ, I bet a capable tutor could train you to score a good deal higher than 1060.

A good tutor and sufficient preparation time should be enough to transform anybody into an SAT expert. If that is the case and this indicates a person with low IQ can score high on the test then potentially everybody is potentially an outlier, which then isn’t an outlier at all.

> I have around a 148

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?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

I think a good IQ test would be finding isomorphic graphs. A typical question would be: here's a graph with 7 nodes, tell which of the 4 graphs below it matches.

Lol i just learned about these today

I am not that concerned. The number is as important to me as my exceedingly unimpressive SAT score.

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?

Getting good grades is a grind.

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.

but some courses are easier than others though

> Perhaps their abilities are "unlocked" to the fullest

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.

“Toe the line” is pretty much a synonym to work within the system.

Ah, right! Not a native speaker, got that wrong-way-round and double-up.

Thanks.

No problem. I am a native speaker and it seems a weird expression to me as well (so much that I had to look it up to be sure). I’d expect it to mean what your original usage was.

Don’t get me started on “flammable vs inflammable” vs “accurate vs inaccurate” ;)

Just for the record : I would put my toe over the line. A bit.

My understanding of the phrase "toe the line" was to express that someone is technically within limits but is intentionally testing the boundaries of their limits, but apparently this is not accurate. TIL.

Perhaps the SAT is more like an IQ test (where a "quick wit" is advantageous), and college grades are based more on sustained performance, planning, meeting deadlines etc. These are very different things.

Grades are shockingly dependent on completing busywork on time, so I am not at all surprised that conscientiousness beats intelligence there.

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