2 ms·

It's a fair point. People can't be reduced to a 5-D vector of traits. (Otherwise novelists would be out of a job.) But OCEAN does capture a lot of human vari

by dash2 10y ago

It's a fair point. People can't be reduced to a 5-D vector of traits. (Otherwise novelists would be out of a job.) But OCEAN does capture a lot of human variability.

disgruntledphd2 10y ago
Can you provide citations please? All the correlations I've seen have been in the 0.3 range, which doesn't equate to a lot of human variability. I actually think this study is pretty interesting. Full text here: http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/8/e1600451.full http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/8/e1600451.full I don't believe in their clustering, but then I rarely believe the output of any unsupervised learning methods. Its an interesting approach, the real question is whether or not it captures incremental variance relative to an OCEAN (or the six factor one they like in medicine) baseline.
- dash2 10y ago
  Heh, so now I had to read the actual study. I agree it's interesting, but my original impression was also true: this isn't about discovering basic personality types. It's about correlating play across four 2 x 2 experimental games. This is a very, very narrow domain of social behaviour. Standard personality psychology, by contrast, aims to predict behaviour across a much wider range of situations. (I still think that is true, even if individual correlations are low in any one situation. But, if you know better and personality measures actually a crock of crap, feel free to correct me!) Of course, it's possible that there really are four deep types of human personality, that you can capture them in these four games, and that they predict behaviour in lots and lots of domains. But I doubt it, and this article provides no evidence for it. What's more interesting is the comparison between this unsupervised clustering method, and more theory-driven ways of categorising play in games, like inequality aversion models. I think there is an interesting race between psychologists, who pay greater attention to internal validity, and experimental economists who focus on theory consistency. I'd like to know which kind of models does better at predicting out of sample.

by dash2 10y ago

It's a fair point. People can't be reduced to a 5-D vector of traits. (Otherwise novelists would be out of a job.) But OCEAN does capture a lot of human variability.

disgruntledphd2 10y ago

Can you provide citations please? All the correlations I've seen have been in the 0.3 range, which doesn't equate to a lot of human variability. I actually think this study is pretty interesting. Full text here: http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/8/e1600451.full http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/8/e1600451.full I don't believe in their clustering, but then I rarely believe the output of any unsupervised learning methods. Its an interesting approach, the real question is whether or not it captures incremental variance relative to an OCEAN (or the six factor one they like in medicine) baseline.

dash2 10y ago
Heh, so now I had to read the actual study. I agree it's interesting, but my original impression was also true: this isn't about discovering basic personality types. It's about correlating play across four 2 x 2 experimental games. This is a very, very narrow domain of social behaviour. Standard personality psychology, by contrast, aims to predict behaviour across a much wider range of situations. (I still think that is true, even if individual correlations are low in any one situation. But, if you know better and personality measures actually a crock of crap, feel free to correct me!) Of course, it's possible that there really are four deep types of human personality, that you can capture them in these four games, and that they predict behaviour in lots and lots of domains. But I doubt it, and this article provides no evidence for it. What's more interesting is the comparison between this unsupervised clustering method, and more theory-driven ways of categorising play in games, like inequality aversion models. I think there is an interesting race between psychologists, who pay greater attention to internal validity, and experimental economists who focus on theory consistency. I'd like to know which kind of models does better at predicting out of sample.