11 ms·

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 in

by jawns 5y ago

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 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 :)

HPsquared 5y ago
My (lay) understanding is that personality data tend to be clustered such that it's best explained by five factors, with the names of the factors (Openness, Conscientiousness, etc.) having been added later.
- infogulch 5y ago
  Wikipedia states it pretty well, "When factor analysis (a statistical technique) is applied to personality survey data, it reveals semantic associations: some words used to describe aspects of personality are often applied to the same person." [1] 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
  - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
    Wildly successful is a term that would be better applied to item response theory models, the Big 5 (and personality psychology more generally) are at the leeches stage compared to them. 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.
    - infogulch 5y ago
      By response theory do you mean behavior research by Skinner, Panksepp, etc? Yes, basically everything in personality psychology barely even registers compared to that, I agree that my comparison was too broad. A more reasonable statement might have been that Big 5 is wildly successful compared to other personality models. Thank you for the correction.
      - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
        Nope, I meant item response theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Item_response_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Item_response_theory It's a much, much better method for designing and analysing questionnaires, and it is the foundation for all standardised testing (SAT, MCAT etc).
mathrando 5y ago
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-snakeoil.pdf https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/talks/MIT-STS-AI-snake...
- ghaff 5y ago
  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 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.
  - vmception 5y ago
    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
    - Icathian 5y ago
      "I will lie to manipulate you into fucking me, and also I think I'm smarter than everyone". You charmer, you.
      - vmception 5y ago
        You decided to read that 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?
tikhonj 5y ago
My understanding is that the point of the Big Five model is that the design was the other way around—we started by looking at how answers to personality-related questions naturally clustered, then we gave names to those clusters. We define "agreeableness" because a particular set of answers/preferences/etc were correlated and could be interpreted as "agreeableness". 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.
anbende 5y ago
While this is true for a lot of common psychological constructs, the Big Five were not defined according to agreement or consensus. The definitions were driven by the lexical hypothesis whereby the wide variety of personality descriptive adjectives in human language were factor analyzed and found to cluster into 5 distinct factors. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_hypothesis Source 2: I'm a psychologist and did research in this area
- jawns 5y ago
  But isn't that just tautology with an intermediate step? 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.
  - dr_dshiv 5y ago
    I suppose they asked 1000s of different questions, each representing a different personality characteristic. After factor analysis, some arbitrary number of factors were found to account for most of the variance. Why did they settle for 5 vs 8 vs 12?
    - anbende 5y ago
      There are a number of metrics that are commonly used to settle on a number of factors to extract. There's some judgment in it to be sure, but you are looking at data-driven phenomena as well like percentage of variance explained, a precipitous drop in new added value, and etc. 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-factors/ https://www.theanalysisfactor.com/factor-analysis-how-many-f...
toast0 5y ago
> 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 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.
- eCa 5y ago
  Quite a leap from ”I’m agreeable but prefers to be alone” to ”disagreeable people prefers to be more alone than agreeable people”.
jokoon 5y ago
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.
rattray 5y ago
Sure, there are some that seem roughly tautological (like "Popularity" and "Extraversion") but who cares – there's a bunch here that's interesting. 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.
coldtea 5y ago
>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. 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"
drdeca 5y ago
The links at the bottom of Correlated.org , "How Correlated generates its stats" and "A response to Correlated's critics", appear to be broken. Clicking either of them leads to pages that display "Page not found".
callesgg 5y ago
Hum i did not know that word but i have thought allot about that. 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”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_(logic) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_(logic)
- callesgg 5y ago
  Or free will, if you believe or don’t believe in free will is a tautological consequence of how you define the self. 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.

by jawns 5y ago

HPsquared 5y ago

My (lay) understanding is that personality data tend to be clustered such that it's best explained by five factors, with the names of the factors (Openness, Conscientiousness, etc.) having been added later.

infogulch 5y ago
Wikipedia states it pretty well, "When factor analysis (a statistical technique) is applied to personality survey data, it reveals semantic associations: some words used to describe aspects of personality are often applied to the same person." [1] 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
- disgruntledphd2 5y ago
  Wildly successful is a term that would be better applied to item response theory models, the Big 5 (and personality psychology more generally) are at the leeches stage compared to them. 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.
  - infogulch 5y ago
    By response theory do you mean behavior research by Skinner, Panksepp, etc? Yes, basically everything in personality psychology barely even registers compared to that, I agree that my comparison was too broad. A more reasonable statement might have been that Big 5 is wildly successful compared to other personality models. Thank you for the correction.
    - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
      Nope, I meant item response theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Item_response_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Item_response_theory It's a much, much better method for designing and analysing questionnaires, and it is the foundation for all standardised testing (SAT, MCAT etc).

mathrando 5y ago

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-snakeoil.pdf https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/talks/MIT-STS-AI-snake...

ghaff 5y ago
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 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.
- vmception 5y ago
  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
  - Icathian 5y ago
    "I will lie to manipulate you into fucking me, and also I think I'm smarter than everyone". You charmer, you.
    - vmception 5y ago
      You decided to read that 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?

tikhonj 5y ago

My understanding is that the point of the Big Five model is that the design was the other way around—we started by looking at how answers to personality-related questions naturally clustered, then we gave names to those clusters. We define "agreeableness" because a particular set of answers/preferences/etc were correlated and could be interpreted as "agreeableness". 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.

anbende 5y ago

While this is true for a lot of common psychological constructs, the Big Five were not defined according to agreement or consensus. The definitions were driven by the lexical hypothesis whereby the wide variety of personality descriptive adjectives in human language were factor analyzed and found to cluster into 5 distinct factors. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_hypothesis Source 2: I'm a psychologist and did research in this area

jawns 5y ago
But isn't that just tautology with an intermediate step? 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.
- dr_dshiv 5y ago
  I suppose they asked 1000s of different questions, each representing a different personality characteristic. After factor analysis, some arbitrary number of factors were found to account for most of the variance. Why did they settle for 5 vs 8 vs 12?
  - anbende 5y ago
    There are a number of metrics that are commonly used to settle on a number of factors to extract. There's some judgment in it to be sure, but you are looking at data-driven phenomena as well like percentage of variance explained, a precipitous drop in new added value, and etc. 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-factors/ https://www.theanalysisfactor.com/factor-analysis-how-many-f...

toast0 5y ago

> 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 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.

eCa 5y ago
Quite a leap from ”I’m agreeable but prefers to be alone” to ”disagreeable people prefers to be more alone than agreeable people”.

jokoon 5y ago

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.

rattray 5y ago

Sure, there are some that seem roughly tautological (like "Popularity" and "Extraversion") but who cares – there's a bunch here that's interesting. 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.

coldtea 5y ago

>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. 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"

drdeca 5y ago

The links at the bottom of Correlated.org , "How Correlated generates its stats" and "A response to Correlated's critics", appear to be broken. Clicking either of them leads to pages that display "Page not found".

callesgg 5y ago

Hum i did not know that word but i have thought allot about that. 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”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_(logic) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_(logic)

callesgg 5y ago
Or free will, if you believe or don’t believe in free will is a tautological consequence of how you define the self. 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.