Seems to me that there are entire categories of people who are agreeable and dishonest, to the point of strotypes: con-men are almost by definition agreeable and dishonest; politicians and used car salesmen have repuations of usually being both; etc.
This makes sense, although you have to balance it against the understanding that Every Personality Trait Is Misnamed.
Agreeableness is really more to do with patience, even-temper, and freedom from anger than literally agreeing with others. Some politicians may be even-tempered, but the current president doesn't give that impression!
I tentatively agree. I'm trying to pry it apart: What if honesty-honor, even if distinct, is not a character trait? One of the things Peterson mentioned with Big 5 factor analysis is that those traits are stable in time. At first glance it doesn't seem so to me. Could you definitively reject this argument?
These traits are indeed stable over time, especially in terms of rank-ordering. In other words, the most Extraverted person in the room is likely to be the most Extraverted even many years later (so long as nobody new walks into the room).
But traits do tend to change over the lifespan. For example, in two samples of older (>65) adults: "High rank-order stability was observed... whereas Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Intellect declined significantly in the older cohort [>81 years]" (From http://tinyurl.com/4d83dx8n ) And traits are much less stable in younger people, because they have less choice over their environment, which prevents their innate predispositions from coming though as strongly: "Meta-analytic estimates of mean population test-retest correlation coefficients showed that trait consistency increased from .31 in childhood to .54 during the college years, to .64 at age 30, and then reached a plateau around .74 between ages 50 and 70." (From http://tinyurl.com/2s3ee2fd )
The H-factor we're talking about is similar to other personality traits in terms of its stability, heritability, breadth, and ability to predict real-world outcomes. (See for example http://tinyurl.com/5h4s8ujw ). But whether any of these things mean H really is a character trait is probably more a philosophical question about what we think it means for something to be, or not to be, a character trait.
You don't seem to have that many in the amoral, carefree quadrant. I wonder if that's selection bias from surveying rationalists, who seem like they would be in the uptight/ethical quadrant.
Hah! Actually this kind of thing had happened in every sample I've ever checked, and all the major psychologists' samples, too; that's why *their* H and A always correlated. The problem is deeper. It's the terms themselves - the way humans use language.
There are plenty of single word terms for people in the upper right and lower left. People we like are honest and selfless, and we're so interested in the lower left that we're *still* coining words like psychopathic and Narcissistic to describe the bad guys. But the other corners are evaluatively ambivalent, so words for them barely even exist across human languages.
That's why, even to fill in the space, I had to Frankenstein terms together. "Principled, uptight" sounds right, and "amoral, carefree" is OK, but I guarantee a lot of my respondents were wrinkling their noses at "ethical, unforgiving."
That's really interesting. And yet it would have been familiar to any premodern society, ranging from medieval witchhunters (the ones who weren't corrupt) to the parts of the Inquisition that weren't on the take, Robespierre (he never profited off the people he killed), your stereotypical (noncorrupt) conservative or communist commissar, and arguably many modern progressives. The upright but merciless judge must have been something people ran into hundreds of times and knew to fear.
I think so too; and the charming rascals, bawdy sailors, and court jesters were always around as well. They had the nouns to identify these people, but the scientific studies always analyzed adjectives, and I don't know of many that would apply to these kinds of people.
Might be interesting to see which cultures the Honesty-Humility axis came out in. From what I can tell it started when they started doing lexical similarities in languages other than English, specifically "Dutch, French, Korean, Polish, Croatian, Filipino, Greek, German, Italian, Hungarian, and Turkish". While some of these have had their own empires, a lot of these cultures, including some of the ones with their own empires, have been conquered many times by larger powers, and would be likely to have a much more cynical attitude to authority than Brits or Americans, who were hard to invade and conquer, and toward the top of the global food chain for much of the period under study.
also thanks, I find this very useful, and will find it useful inthe future.
Pity about the deontological suboptimal pothole though, IMHO the two Two Dimensions of Morality are Kantian elves. They are not needed to further your work.
It may be better to think of traits as vectors, out or in from each of our Janus faces to self/to world.
(Here I betray my social ecology training).
Narcissists and psychopaths (NAPs) don't world, they only self (or so it looks from our POV at them out there in our world), the lack of empathy has wide area affects. For example NAPs neither lie or tell the truth they just say stuff and the (our) world pivots around them, whether its true to any of us is meaningless to them. And like broken analog clocks they can be right twice a day. They do respond to rewards though, so they say stuff to get stuff but there is little to no worlding in this. They are a singularity.
Vis-avis the two dimensions of morality & traits: A vector that might be worth accessing with some stats, is where on the Janus ratio to self/to world we each live, and/or that we ascribe to our societies expectations. And how big that heart is in terms of resilience before we retreat into 100% selfing 0% worlding, despite ourselves.
Some peeps world more (agreeableness) while some self more on themselves, and some self more on the world (when we say "something should be done" but it is directed at no one in particular).
How many community members does it take to change a light globe? None the community does it.
(all this is why I say 'morality' is an outcome, a recipe not the hunger)(recipes are worldly things we share in answering hunger pangs).
(This week I've been reading up on the math/s used in LLMs by way of neural networks of weighted terms, there must be some useful connection here with the language based stuff you mentioned in your post. Also maybe with fuzzy logic/ neural network hybrid decision-making system design??)(I may be talking through my hat).
just because its in our heads, another urge ( Isuspect it is ddeply intwingin with whatever it is I call worlding and its nexus with psychological attachment (raising children into empathic personhood).
Kant is a post-hoc rationalization of this urge. (An outcome not a source) of how things should be.
That was a very interesting link; it got really weird by this paragraph:
"The psychology of possibility examines how people conceptualize possibilities, including those that involve morality. Interestingly, immoral actions are often initially represented as impossible by both children and adults. This intertwinement of morality and possibility could impact their views on the changeability of moral norms."
yeah, I noticed this, so, gives it a go thinking aloud.... some sort of interference because we are using the only model we have for many different things, and error's are compounded when we think we are good at it (??)
we are not well disposed to be able to note our our biases (and allow for them) while we are using them to think, or...
(here i go anyways, sheesh...)
...or live... such that the normative field of view and action (what it should be) and reality as it is beyond us but-we-know-about (via hindsight, logic, predictable but expect the worse, skills of routine we learn via Freud's Reality principle) are two causal chanins that are not easy for us to keep separate, or at least a handle on??
we enmesh them as much as we do other impossible things before breakfast.
I reckon the urge (to should/to world) sets up massive interference when we model "reality" as it is compared to how it "should be" and vice-versa. Hard to see one without viewing it through the other.
The hard sciences have taken centuries to work through this, and generally only sees the macro- political/religious end of the scenario as its honoured enemies. The credulous among us who dine at the anti-pizzagate party have not been considered except as fodder for demogoguery. (flying monkeys), and they think/feel they are doing good. And act according to how they perceive those risk factors which are worse case scenario inducing... hmmhmhmhmhmh
In a culture's strong ontology (folksonomies as we live them)
one
<thinks>I am a good person, therefore: "It is impossible that _MY_ daughter is gay."</thinks>
<thinks>I am a good person, therefore: "It is impossible that _MY_ preferred champion is actually a narcissist."</thinks>
... then denial/conspiracy feelings, stages of grief or insanity... conversion therapy, insurrection etc etc, unless one changes one view of a good person as someone who can change themselves (I'd argue this requires empathy, which failures at the reality principle/gom jabber cannot do(narcissists) ???) very messy
It's weird because it contains a cross infection of causal chains, ((and I wish I knew what I mean by that)) rather than a systemic paradox per se. I should delete this but anyways....
different example in relation to the elf not others: aligning/assigning gender ontologies with one's perception of one's body would perhaps example a different cross-causal chain, particularly if the lived transition is reneged on, (oh for a pronoun-free diet)
we have an urge to organise, but the detail is left to almost chance memes, and we find it (how we organise) good, and if it isn't good it is either:
∞ impossible because I am good,
∞ or evil is at work.
Unless we grow up.
Hunger, a more primary urge, does not tell you how to cook, let alone organise the menu, remember the recipe, make the cookware, tend the fire, if not repair the fence last Tuesday to keep the goats out of the herb garden... and who you invite to dinner... only the good ones?)
>>>>what is good cannot change, also I cannot change reality
hmmh, awkward thinking
therefore as I am good what I think the world is also does not change unless <insert preferred demonology or favourite conspiracy theory here>,
or, perhaps for the reasonable among us: if things change I am not good (not special.... very painful for some) and i need to change, this get interfered with by our impossibility detector (which may of may not be logical, but we use it in logic anyway, like the sets we use in our cultural ontologies which are nearly always bound/cemented up with morals) and because of this we see doctrine as a way out,
Sort of, in places, but only because I have a sense of your thought patterns. Ultimately, I would really avoid writing a stream of consciousness - I think that's why you're hard to understand. You often have many thoughts, questions, and asides, and I suspect you are probably very accurate at transcribing what is going on internally. But that doesn't mean anyone else can follow it!
I was reading these notes for brainstormy state of mech interps conversation yesterday when I was really tired, without proper context the trade jargon is deep, but I think I may have got there, at getting its import, at least I worked out it was a conversation, (pretty sure we need more punctuation not less)
On the Kolb learning style index I did once I was massively divergent compared to anyone else I knew... its no fun being an outlier, even in astrological terms:
"Divergent -- The divergent learning style has the opposite learning strengths from the convergent. It emphasizes concrete experience and reflective observation. Its greatest strength lies in imaginative ability and awareness of meaning and values. The primary adaptive ability of divergence is to view concrete situations from many perspectives and to organize many relationships into a meaningful "gestalt." The emphasis in this orientation is on adaptation by observation rather than action. It is called divergent because it works best in situations that call for generation of alternative ideas and implications, such as a "brainstorming" idea session. "
Meika you're *genuinely* interesting. Just... how do I convince you to make sense?
> (I may be talking through my hat).
You're *always* talking through your hat! You remind me of a smart version of some guy I used to know who was diagnosed as schizotypal. Are you schizotypal? Dude make sense!
I've been in New Zealand for a couple of weeks and some of my relaxed thoughts return to the schizotypal comment. I have stated that I would like to be that weird, but only get to being a bit odd on every second Tuesday. And while I have also stated I consider myself <dad joke>mildly not autistic<end dad joke> …when I spent time in the 80s with peeps with diagnoses at the schizophrenia extreme I found them very intriguing (but not that they reminding me of myself per se, I don't believe in my flights of fancy, and have never felt someone or something is out to get me…)
and never caused me subsequent anxiety/ depression/ hallucinations..) and so I wondered about myself in comparison but not recognition.
and in NZ I wondered about this because I think as a child I was 'more autistic' than I was/am after the teenage years, (and less now at nearly 60) and I further wondered if the middle teenage years of brain/neuronal pruning (following which schizophrenia may well often appear) stopped me being so autistic, or, the autistic traits stopped me becoming more schizotypal??? Just a fancy, from returning from New Zealand. PS loved the group survey.
In my entire life I have been to Australia once, and New Zealand never. What is New Zealand like? Come to think of it, what is Australia like nowadays? Has it changed much in the last decade?
Well, 20 years ago people from the rest of Australia talked about "the Sydney conversation" but now all we talk about across Australia & New Zealand is real estate. I guess that's more of a trend. Melbourne is now the largest Australian city (again). Happened the same year India overtook China. South Asians are the biggest migrant group in Melbourne (network effect?). (Nepalese in Hobart where I live).
Despite Murdoch enforced lack of action on climate change Australians have put so much solar panels on their roofs its is causing difficulties with the old distribution infrastructure.
No fentanyl or tranq as yet.
Hobart has just come out of a peak housing crises, increasing population in AUS is mostly due to migration and this and subsequent housing pressure has returned to normal after covid on the 'mainland'. I.E. not easy to find somewhere to live. IN recent elections conservative/ professinal women refuse to vote for Murdoch enforced goons and have created their own grouping called the Teal independents. (Murdoch keeps importing anti-something programmes against things that don't exist here, until he imports their anti- (i.e. political correctness, wokeness etc). (Murdoch is a businessmen who capitalises on being a troll, he did this at his private school by being a marxist agitator --- it was a pose, it generated narcky supply). The Teals are the biggest change. Also, and this is worldwide, when I was young the only anti-vaxxers were left wing air-heads, but now wellness seems to have captured a more ecumenical stupidity quotient of society.
New Zealand is very similar, except their relations with the original owners is more settled, more integrated and even your evangelical hosts can tell you about Maori culture... and the closer ties with Tasmania are more forgotten now. I kept surprising them with things/terms that we regard as TAS, and they as NZ. I do not know why anyone leaves NZ, but visitors to TAS say the same thing. Hip pocket our hosts said. Both my AUS cousins have partnered with Maori lads here in AUS. So by some non-racial kin thing I do not understand I have some indirect distant connection with Maori Iwis or something someplace. More than I do with the Palawa or Pakana of Tasmania (which is not zero).
Was your visit just youthful touring or business? IMpressions? I could update those?
(Also you are much easy to talk with than many USA peeps I've tried to converse with online, including distant relative (the geneaology thing). I am sure this is all my communicationss issues though.)
Poking around a bit, the Teal Independents don't sound so bad from what I can see, rather a blend of what in the US we'd call libertarianism and green. This appeals to me since I have a soft spot for libertarianism, but my feeling is that one of the biggest downsides to libertarianism is its trouble handling issues like the environment; smearing everything together and calling it teal seems pretty OK.
My impressions from my visit to Australia were that the accents and the toilets were weird, the flora and fauna were interesting, and the cheese was pretty tasty. The ethnic groups were more distinct in their accents and behavior than here. White Australians were remarkably open to casual conversation, and all had sense of humor which most Americans utterly lack. Other groups followed their own stereotypes more or less, though they all seemed to have absorbed a kind of Aussie relaxed helpfulness that's disappeared from urban areas in the US - if it ever existed to begin with. I suspect that having clear migration policy is responsible for this; here in the US people just wander in, and who knows who they are.
Apparently in New Hampshire they understand sarcasm.
We've had a migration policy since day one, I have _one_ ancestor of whom it is not known how he arrived in the colonies (probs before 1815). The lack of information makes him very unusual. Since WW2 there have been various policies to help peeps help peeps settled that recognizes cultural differences within the context that you're doing it here. A fact which both culture warriors and sops ignore so they can fight each other. (I have a soft spot for anarchists as most libertarians here I meet are "propertarians", and they seem to stand at the edge of their property (rights are seen as property) yelling "Mine! Mine! Mine!" all day long. MINE!!! And if they could get rid of the market to maintain their property then they would accept any rent-seeking proposal that came along. MINE! (I think I am copying the seagulls from Finding Nemo).
no, just mildly not autistic (I lack the anxiety quotient). See https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/the-sky-pool for how NAPs differ from Autistic self-absorbed-ness (its just a special project).
My blog is entirely an attempt to make sense (LOL). I am trying to explain myself.
I do make an effort to verb more than I noun. I had a long “discussion” with an LLM the other day getting it to give me the weighting for varous terms and to explain vectors in LLM neural networks, and how ‘topics’ are used… I had to go elsewhere to get more… sense of how they differ from Fuzzy Logic coding (its something I looked at 15 years ago or more).
_________
In my first comment above is the first time I have used the term "Janus ratio" for the
"to (self/world)"
verb/verbing pair or blur. I quite like it. In this area of the comment I was thinking aloud, not so much hat.
kelp links with the use of ‘beloved son of the house’ a character who worlds at the expense of their good self, which is from Susanna Clarke’s novel (slipstream?) Piranesi
“ the world is given me” is a direct quote from a translation of Wittgenstein in
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte. Philosophische Untersuchungen = Philosophical investigations. Rev. 4th ed. Chichester, West Sussex, U.K. ; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.
"Here read this huge post about factors and names and respondents" = yawn
"Minor Internet celebrities are wrong! Laugh and feel glad you're in the know while you read this huge post about factors and names and respondents" = IDK, what is this again?
"Will we ever see major celebrity the same way after sexy nudie sex video on Instagram? Find out at this clickbait!" = Whoa, like... is this even substack?
It seems unfair to criticize those people, like myself. I know about HEXACO, of course, but why would I talk about it? It's just another factorization. (It's not like any of these are real in any strong sense: there is no 'H' gland in the brain that OCEAN practitioners are denying the existence of!) It's fine, and I have nothing against it, but it's one used by relatively few of the datasets or papers I am interested in, so...
Nor does this post make a good case that I would want to throw the OCEAN factorization out (were that in any way within my power) in favor of HEXACO - why is adding this factor and refactorizing *so* important? What does it *do* for me? Would any claim I have ever made about, say, Conscientiousness, be changed if the same C analysis had instead been doing using the 'C' from a HEXACO inventory...? If not, perhaps you should reflect: are you making a meaningful criticism (https://gwern.net/research-criticism), or just squabbling?
> I know about HEXACO, of course, but why would I talk about it? It's just another factorization.
That is true, yes. By the same token, Eysenck's old E & N model is just another factorization. Is anything meaningful lost by dropping from five replicable factors to two? If the answer is yes, then prima facie, something meaningful is likely also lost by dropping from six replicable factors to five.
> why is adding this factor and refactorizing *so* important? What does it *do* for me?
The addition of the H-factor opens up a large body of research on human behavior, letting you 1. clarify the difference between people who are disagreeable or antagonistic from those who are immoral, 2. understand behaviors beyond sheer criminality which arise from self-centeredness, 3. recognize symptoms and tells for immoral behavior, 4. recognize that the secular left is weighed down by a morality deficit, 5. appreciate utilitarianism has greater appeal to people who are less moral, etc.
Since you've invited me to reflect, I'll comment that while I really do wish more people knew about and understood H, there is a silver lining: the widespread silence regarding H has at least been useful to me as a blogger, as it gives me an open area for discussion. You could very easily benefit from the increased resolution in the HEXACO yourself - there's about twenty years of low hanging fruit on the HEXACO tree.
Lastly, I definitely do understand that it would be quite irritating to have some nobody blogging at some random site called Things to Read accusing you of not knowing things that maybe you really do know very well! In my defense, though, when you ask about the HEXACO, "What does it do for me," that does make me wonder how familiar you really are with what's hanging from that tree.
Yes, but Eysenck's factorization *does* drop topics of interest to me and I can explain why the prima facie assumption is either wrong or right: I'm not very interested in extraversion/introversion at all, but I am interested in intelligence & the intelligentsia, so I need O; and I'm interested in economics and productivity, so I need C. (I have little use for E or A, but some use for N in psychiatry.) Whereas EN omits O/C and doesn't even give me his P factor for psychiatry or behavioral genetics topics! So I can explain quite clearly why his EPN is more interesting to me than EN, and why OCEAN/HEXACO would be more useful than EPN. (I regard it as a bit of a weakness that you can't all that easily get a P-like factor out of OCEAN, but most psychiatry datasets/studies where you'd want a P will be doing diagnoses or MMPI or other things which can substitute for P, and you can't get everything you want in life.)
Meanwhile, most of your H examples don't sound in any of my bailiwicks. You don't mention anything I've written where H would make a major change, and most of your list of examples sounds like things that are more interesting to you than to me. 1/2: I don't think any of my occasional references to crime (or broader anti-social behavior) really hinges on 'disagreeable' vs 'immoral' - mostly for me, the important thing about crime is that it exists as a blackbox and how it responds or doesn't respond to social engineering (and I have little faith that incorporating H would allow much prediction of that); 3: sounds mildly interesting but also a bit dubious & circular (do I really need to appeal to personality inventories to learn how to recognize bad people? especially given their construction?), like saying you can better learn to recognize what 'a hard worker' looks like by reading NEO items; 4/5: the sort of topic I should avoid the temptation, in large part because it tends to produce more heat than light. If this is what the H tree has hanging from it, it sounds like the low-hanging fruit is not so much apples but coconuts - and I don't like coconuts.
> In my defense, though, when you ask about the HEXACO, "What does it do for me," that does make me wonder how familiar you really are with what's hanging from that tree.
Who can be completely familiar with everything? But when I choose my day's reading, things in AI always look far more interesting and important and overfill the day; and when I skim all of the HEXACO studies I cite on gwern.net, I just see ordinary personality studies which look mostly like they would've if they used OCEAN and come with no big surprises.
Still, as much as I am more interested in DL scaling these days, I'm not going to go around citing you as an example of 'Apple Pie is completely ignorant of scaling, what a fool!' unless I had something more specific to say where you were failing. (Which at some point might be true - IMO, by far the most interesting thing to happen in personality psychology in years, if not decades, is the huge greenfield of opportunity represented by LLMs being little brains in boxes that you can do personality & other individual-differences research on _in silico_, representing far richer opportunity for datasets & experimentation than the 'dust bowl empiricism' of psychometrics developed for the age of desk calculators, and if psychologists keep sleeping on it they may find their lunch eaten by economists etc - but is not yet.)
I'm not interested in New Zealand, but that doesn't mean I'm going to use maps that don't include it. You've taken personality tests and reported the results over and over again at https://gwern.net/me#personality . Rather than spending half an hour attempting to defend your lack of knowledge or interest in something that really should be known to most high schoolers, I dunno, maybe you could have just taken the HEXACO and put your numbers on your site?
> I regard it as a bit of a weakness that you can't all that easily get a P-like factor out of OCEAN, but most psychiatry datasets/studies where you'd want a P will be doing diagnoses or MMPI or other things which can substitute for P, and you can't get everything you want in life.)
Frustratingly, even EPN didn't have P; Eysenck's psychoticism really didn't measure what it purported to. I really wish Ashton & Lee would have included some kind of P/oddity/schizotypy/dissociation factor in the HEXACO; they've done factor analyses that find it:
* Ashton, M. C., & Lee, K. (2012). Oddity, Schizotypy/dissociation, and personality. Journal of Personality, 80(1), 113-134.
* Ashton, M. C., Lee, K., de Vries, R. E., Hendrickse, J., & Born, M. P. (2012). The maladaptive personality traits of the Personality Inventory for DSM-5 (PID-5) in relation to the HEXACO personality factors and schizotypy/dissociation. Journal of personality disorders, 26(5), 641-659.
If there were a readily available thing called the HEXACOP, you can bet I would be pushing for it over the HEXACO
> I'm not interested in New Zealand, but that doesn't mean I'm going to use maps that don't include it.
A good example: most of the maps I use *don't* include NZ, and they would be worse if they did. The road map of the USA in my car trunk or the maps in my backup GPS unit? No NZ. The offline Google Maps of London, Oxford, San Francisco I downloaded last year? No NZ. Likewise for NYC, NJ, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia. Google Earth install? No NZ maps cached because I've never needed to even possibly look there (aside from the occasional passing thought wondering what the _Lord of the Ring_ film settings look like these days).
I struggle to think of any time I've genuinely needed to know more about the geography of NZ besides "there's some big islands near the right-hand side of Australia; and there's a lot of sheep". Doubtless there are people to whom the details are important or interesting, beyond just the NZers themselves, but those people have never been me, and looking in the crystal ball, it's unclear they will ever be me.
If you are arguing that H is the NZ of personality factors, then I am happy to agree.
> You've taken personality tests and reported the results over and over again
I've taken Big Five once, as you can see in your link; and I took the others back then because while I was there at Your Morals I might as well do the others and see what they look like. Apparently they didn't include HEXACO, and I don't think I'd learn much from taking it when it's otherwise so similar, nor would it give you a chance to explain why you are so insistent that I ought to find H as interesting as you do.
It is for reasons like these that I decided against studying psychology: When I borrowed a psychology text-book in my youth, it seemed bureaucratic and illogical. Exactly for reasons like the one you outlined above, I guess.
Psychology is an interesting field, as compared with other sciences.
On the one hand, it is one of the most genuinely *scientific* fields out there, in the sense of being dedicated to empiricism: All Questions Shall Be Answered By Gathering and Testing Data. To me, this is a big deal. Yes, psychology often falls short. No, studies aren't all carried out in the most honest way, with preregistered hypotheses being directly tested; and much of the data is gleaned from psych 101 students, who aren't fully representative of even the WEIRD nations where all the psychologists live. But plenty of studies are preregistered with clear hypotheses to test, and plenty of the data comes from a very broad range of respondents (the HEXACO was validated in Croatian, Filipino, Greek, Hungarian, Korean, Polish, and Turkish).
Other fields like physics or economics do a lot of mathematical modelling rather than direct empirical tests, and that's not really a very effective way of checking your thinking for cobwebs. It's much easier to run off a theoretical cliff in physics (e.g. string theory), and econ is notorious for this - just about everything in economics is untested or barely tested. The blogosphere is often like this; people write snappy and insightful posts, with all the arguments that attend the truthiest of truths, and it's all basically a giant untested hypothesis. Knowledge just doesn't progress this way.
But looking at psychology in a completely different way, we have... well... your own observation.
Compared to disciplines like philosophy, mathematics, physics, or chemistry, the field of psychology is saturated with what you might call "high-midwits." And the weight of these otherwise well-meaning, passionate, helpful psychologists exerts a palpable drag on the field. Nowhere in my physics coursework was Aristotle mentioned; everyone knew his ideas about physics just weren't relevant at all. But I also took a handful of psych classes in undergrad, and Freud came up half a dozen times. And when all of your contemporaries are talking about Freud, even a brilliant psychologist is going to think, "Freud, huh... Maybe there's something there," rather than just blinking and realizing Freudianism is a prescientific dead end.
Seems to me that there are entire categories of people who are agreeable and dishonest, to the point of strotypes: con-men are almost by definition agreeable and dishonest; politicians and used car salesmen have repuations of usually being both; etc.
This makes sense, although you have to balance it against the understanding that Every Personality Trait Is Misnamed.
Agreeableness is really more to do with patience, even-temper, and freedom from anger than literally agreeing with others. Some politicians may be even-tempered, but the current president doesn't give that impression!
Lovely piece. And Honesty-Honour works much better than Honesty-Humility.
I tentatively agree. I'm trying to pry it apart: What if honesty-honor, even if distinct, is not a character trait? One of the things Peterson mentioned with Big 5 factor analysis is that those traits are stable in time. At first glance it doesn't seem so to me. Could you definitively reject this argument?
Well, here's what I *can* say definitively.
These traits are indeed stable over time, especially in terms of rank-ordering. In other words, the most Extraverted person in the room is likely to be the most Extraverted even many years later (so long as nobody new walks into the room).
But traits do tend to change over the lifespan. For example, in two samples of older (>65) adults: "High rank-order stability was observed... whereas Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Intellect declined significantly in the older cohort [>81 years]" (From http://tinyurl.com/4d83dx8n ) And traits are much less stable in younger people, because they have less choice over their environment, which prevents their innate predispositions from coming though as strongly: "Meta-analytic estimates of mean population test-retest correlation coefficients showed that trait consistency increased from .31 in childhood to .54 during the college years, to .64 at age 30, and then reached a plateau around .74 between ages 50 and 70." (From http://tinyurl.com/2s3ee2fd )
The H-factor we're talking about is similar to other personality traits in terms of its stability, heritability, breadth, and ability to predict real-world outcomes. (See for example http://tinyurl.com/5h4s8ujw ). But whether any of these things mean H really is a character trait is probably more a philosophical question about what we think it means for something to be, or not to be, a character trait.
You don't seem to have that many in the amoral, carefree quadrant. I wonder if that's selection bias from surveying rationalists, who seem like they would be in the uptight/ethical quadrant.
Maybe hit an anime board?
Hah! Actually this kind of thing had happened in every sample I've ever checked, and all the major psychologists' samples, too; that's why *their* H and A always correlated. The problem is deeper. It's the terms themselves - the way humans use language.
There are plenty of single word terms for people in the upper right and lower left. People we like are honest and selfless, and we're so interested in the lower left that we're *still* coining words like psychopathic and Narcissistic to describe the bad guys. But the other corners are evaluatively ambivalent, so words for them barely even exist across human languages.
That's why, even to fill in the space, I had to Frankenstein terms together. "Principled, uptight" sounds right, and "amoral, carefree" is OK, but I guarantee a lot of my respondents were wrinkling their noses at "ethical, unforgiving."
That's really interesting. And yet it would have been familiar to any premodern society, ranging from medieval witchhunters (the ones who weren't corrupt) to the parts of the Inquisition that weren't on the take, Robespierre (he never profited off the people he killed), your stereotypical (noncorrupt) conservative or communist commissar, and arguably many modern progressives. The upright but merciless judge must have been something people ran into hundreds of times and knew to fear.
I think so too; and the charming rascals, bawdy sailors, and court jesters were always around as well. They had the nouns to identify these people, but the scientific studies always analyzed adjectives, and I don't know of many that would apply to these kinds of people.
Might be interesting to see which cultures the Honesty-Humility axis came out in. From what I can tell it started when they started doing lexical similarities in languages other than English, specifically "Dutch, French, Korean, Polish, Croatian, Filipino, Greek, German, Italian, Hungarian, and Turkish". While some of these have had their own empires, a lot of these cultures, including some of the ones with their own empires, have been conquered many times by larger powers, and would be likely to have a much more cynical attitude to authority than Brits or Americans, who were hard to invade and conquer, and toward the top of the global food chain for much of the period under study.
also thanks, I find this very useful, and will find it useful inthe future.
Pity about the deontological suboptimal pothole though, IMHO the two Two Dimensions of Morality are Kantian elves. They are not needed to further your work.
It may be better to think of traits as vectors, out or in from each of our Janus faces to self/to world.
(Here I betray my social ecology training).
Narcissists and psychopaths (NAPs) don't world, they only self (or so it looks from our POV at them out there in our world), the lack of empathy has wide area affects. For example NAPs neither lie or tell the truth they just say stuff and the (our) world pivots around them, whether its true to any of us is meaningless to them. And like broken analog clocks they can be right twice a day. They do respond to rewards though, so they say stuff to get stuff but there is little to no worlding in this. They are a singularity.
Vis-avis the two dimensions of morality & traits: A vector that might be worth accessing with some stats, is where on the Janus ratio to self/to world we each live, and/or that we ascribe to our societies expectations. And how big that heart is in terms of resilience before we retreat into 100% selfing 0% worlding, despite ourselves.
Some peeps world more (agreeableness) while some self more on themselves, and some self more on the world (when we say "something should be done" but it is directed at no one in particular).
How many community members does it take to change a light globe? None the community does it.
(all this is why I say 'morality' is an outcome, a recipe not the hunger)(recipes are worldly things we share in answering hunger pangs).
(This week I've been reading up on the math/s used in LLMs by way of neural networks of weighted terms, there must be some useful connection here with the language based stuff you mentioned in your post. Also maybe with fuzzy logic/ neural network hybrid decision-making system design??)(I may be talking through my hat).
https://www.psypost.org/2024/01/children-deny-that-god-can-change-fundamental-moral-principles-study-finds-220522
just because its in our heads, another urge ( Isuspect it is ddeply intwingin with whatever it is I call worlding and its nexus with psychological attachment (raising children into empathic personhood).
Kant is a post-hoc rationalization of this urge. (An outcome not a source) of how things should be.
The subjunctive as creation myth.
That was a very interesting link; it got really weird by this paragraph:
"The psychology of possibility examines how people conceptualize possibilities, including those that involve morality. Interestingly, immoral actions are often initially represented as impossible by both children and adults. This intertwinement of morality and possibility could impact their views on the changeability of moral norms."
yeah, I noticed this, so, gives it a go thinking aloud.... some sort of interference because we are using the only model we have for many different things, and error's are compounded when we think we are good at it (??)
we are not well disposed to be able to note our our biases (and allow for them) while we are using them to think, or...
(here i go anyways, sheesh...)
...or live... such that the normative field of view and action (what it should be) and reality as it is beyond us but-we-know-about (via hindsight, logic, predictable but expect the worse, skills of routine we learn via Freud's Reality principle) are two causal chanins that are not easy for us to keep separate, or at least a handle on??
we enmesh them as much as we do other impossible things before breakfast.
I reckon the urge (to should/to world) sets up massive interference when we model "reality" as it is compared to how it "should be" and vice-versa. Hard to see one without viewing it through the other.
The hard sciences have taken centuries to work through this, and generally only sees the macro- political/religious end of the scenario as its honoured enemies. The credulous among us who dine at the anti-pizzagate party have not been considered except as fodder for demogoguery. (flying monkeys), and they think/feel they are doing good. And act according to how they perceive those risk factors which are worse case scenario inducing... hmmhmhmhmhmh
In a culture's strong ontology (folksonomies as we live them)
one
<thinks>I am a good person, therefore: "It is impossible that _MY_ daughter is gay."</thinks>
<thinks>I am a good person, therefore: "It is impossible that _MY_ preferred champion is actually a narcissist."</thinks>
... then denial/conspiracy feelings, stages of grief or insanity... conversion therapy, insurrection etc etc, unless one changes one view of a good person as someone who can change themselves (I'd argue this requires empathy, which failures at the reality principle/gom jabber cannot do(narcissists) ???) very messy
It's weird because it contains a cross infection of causal chains, ((and I wish I knew what I mean by that)) rather than a systemic paradox per se. I should delete this but anyways....
different example in relation to the elf not others: aligning/assigning gender ontologies with one's perception of one's body would perhaps example a different cross-causal chain, particularly if the lived transition is reneged on, (oh for a pronoun-free diet)
we have an urge to organise, but the detail is left to almost chance memes, and we find it (how we organise) good, and if it isn't good it is either:
∞ impossible because I am good,
∞ or evil is at work.
Unless we grow up.
Hunger, a more primary urge, does not tell you how to cook, let alone organise the menu, remember the recipe, make the cookware, tend the fire, if not repair the fence last Tuesday to keep the goats out of the herb garden... and who you invite to dinner... only the good ones?)
>>>>what is good cannot change, also I cannot change reality
hmmh, awkward thinking
therefore as I am good what I think the world is also does not change unless <insert preferred demonology or favourite conspiracy theory here>,
or, perhaps for the reasonable among us: if things change I am not good (not special.... very painful for some) and i need to change, this get interfered with by our impossibility detector (which may of may not be logical, but we use it in logic anyway, like the sets we use in our cultural ontologies which are nearly always bound/cemented up with morals) and because of this we see doctrine as a way out,
did that make any sense?
Sort of, in places, but only because I have a sense of your thought patterns. Ultimately, I would really avoid writing a stream of consciousness - I think that's why you're hard to understand. You often have many thoughts, questions, and asides, and I suspect you are probably very accurate at transcribing what is going on internally. But that doesn't mean anyone else can follow it!
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tEPHGZAb63dfq2v8n/how-useful-is-mechanistic-interpretability
I was reading these notes for brainstormy state of mech interps conversation yesterday when I was really tired, without proper context the trade jargon is deep, but I think I may have got there, at getting its import, at least I worked out it was a conversation, (pretty sure we need more punctuation not less)
On the Kolb learning style index I did once I was massively divergent compared to anyone else I knew... its no fun being an outlier, even in astrological terms:
"Divergent -- The divergent learning style has the opposite learning strengths from the convergent. It emphasizes concrete experience and reflective observation. Its greatest strength lies in imaginative ability and awareness of meaning and values. The primary adaptive ability of divergence is to view concrete situations from many perspectives and to organize many relationships into a meaningful "gestalt." The emphasis in this orientation is on adaptation by observation rather than action. It is called divergent because it works best in situations that call for generation of alternative ideas and implications, such as a "brainstorming" idea session. "
My besties have often been massively convergent.
Meika you're *genuinely* interesting. Just... how do I convince you to make sense?
> (I may be talking through my hat).
You're *always* talking through your hat! You remind me of a smart version of some guy I used to know who was diagnosed as schizotypal. Are you schizotypal? Dude make sense!
I've been in New Zealand for a couple of weeks and some of my relaxed thoughts return to the schizotypal comment. I have stated that I would like to be that weird, but only get to being a bit odd on every second Tuesday. And while I have also stated I consider myself <dad joke>mildly not autistic<end dad joke> …when I spent time in the 80s with peeps with diagnoses at the schizophrenia extreme I found them very intriguing (but not that they reminding me of myself per se, I don't believe in my flights of fancy, and have never felt someone or something is out to get me…)
and never caused me subsequent anxiety/ depression/ hallucinations..) and so I wondered about myself in comparison but not recognition.
and in NZ I wondered about this because I think as a child I was 'more autistic' than I was/am after the teenage years, (and less now at nearly 60) and I further wondered if the middle teenage years of brain/neuronal pruning (following which schizophrenia may well often appear) stopped me being so autistic, or, the autistic traits stopped me becoming more schizotypal??? Just a fancy, from returning from New Zealand. PS loved the group survey.
In my entire life I have been to Australia once, and New Zealand never. What is New Zealand like? Come to think of it, what is Australia like nowadays? Has it changed much in the last decade?
Well, 20 years ago people from the rest of Australia talked about "the Sydney conversation" but now all we talk about across Australia & New Zealand is real estate. I guess that's more of a trend. Melbourne is now the largest Australian city (again). Happened the same year India overtook China. South Asians are the biggest migrant group in Melbourne (network effect?). (Nepalese in Hobart where I live).
Despite Murdoch enforced lack of action on climate change Australians have put so much solar panels on their roofs its is causing difficulties with the old distribution infrastructure.
No fentanyl or tranq as yet.
Hobart has just come out of a peak housing crises, increasing population in AUS is mostly due to migration and this and subsequent housing pressure has returned to normal after covid on the 'mainland'. I.E. not easy to find somewhere to live. IN recent elections conservative/ professinal women refuse to vote for Murdoch enforced goons and have created their own grouping called the Teal independents. (Murdoch keeps importing anti-something programmes against things that don't exist here, until he imports their anti- (i.e. political correctness, wokeness etc). (Murdoch is a businessmen who capitalises on being a troll, he did this at his private school by being a marxist agitator --- it was a pose, it generated narcky supply). The Teals are the biggest change. Also, and this is worldwide, when I was young the only anti-vaxxers were left wing air-heads, but now wellness seems to have captured a more ecumenical stupidity quotient of society.
New Zealand is very similar, except their relations with the original owners is more settled, more integrated and even your evangelical hosts can tell you about Maori culture... and the closer ties with Tasmania are more forgotten now. I kept surprising them with things/terms that we regard as TAS, and they as NZ. I do not know why anyone leaves NZ, but visitors to TAS say the same thing. Hip pocket our hosts said. Both my AUS cousins have partnered with Maori lads here in AUS. So by some non-racial kin thing I do not understand I have some indirect distant connection with Maori Iwis or something someplace. More than I do with the Palawa or Pakana of Tasmania (which is not zero).
Was your visit just youthful touring or business? IMpressions? I could update those?
(Also you are much easy to talk with than many USA peeps I've tried to converse with online, including distant relative (the geneaology thing). I am sure this is all my communicationss issues though.)
Poking around a bit, the Teal Independents don't sound so bad from what I can see, rather a blend of what in the US we'd call libertarianism and green. This appeals to me since I have a soft spot for libertarianism, but my feeling is that one of the biggest downsides to libertarianism is its trouble handling issues like the environment; smearing everything together and calling it teal seems pretty OK.
My impressions from my visit to Australia were that the accents and the toilets were weird, the flora and fauna were interesting, and the cheese was pretty tasty. The ethnic groups were more distinct in their accents and behavior than here. White Australians were remarkably open to casual conversation, and all had sense of humor which most Americans utterly lack. Other groups followed their own stereotypes more or less, though they all seemed to have absorbed a kind of Aussie relaxed helpfulness that's disappeared from urban areas in the US - if it ever existed to begin with. I suspect that having clear migration policy is responsible for this; here in the US people just wander in, and who knows who they are.
Apparently in New Hampshire they understand sarcasm.
We've had a migration policy since day one, I have _one_ ancestor of whom it is not known how he arrived in the colonies (probs before 1815). The lack of information makes him very unusual. Since WW2 there have been various policies to help peeps help peeps settled that recognizes cultural differences within the context that you're doing it here. A fact which both culture warriors and sops ignore so they can fight each other. (I have a soft spot for anarchists as most libertarians here I meet are "propertarians", and they seem to stand at the edge of their property (rights are seen as property) yelling "Mine! Mine! Mine!" all day long. MINE!!! And if they could get rid of the market to maintain their property then they would accept any rent-seeking proposal that came along. MINE! (I think I am copying the seagulls from Finding Nemo).
no, just mildly not autistic (I lack the anxiety quotient). See https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/the-sky-pool for how NAPs differ from Autistic self-absorbed-ness (its just a special project).
My blog is entirely an attempt to make sense (LOL). I am trying to explain myself.
_________
on a related topic to making sense, have you seen
https://mankind.substack.com/p/emperor-whisperers-how-the-chinese
I do make an effort to verb more than I noun. I had a long “discussion” with an LLM the other day getting it to give me the weighting for varous terms and to explain vectors in LLM neural networks, and how ‘topics’ are used… I had to go elsewhere to get more… sense of how they differ from Fuzzy Logic coding (its something I looked at 15 years ago or more).
_________
In my first comment above is the first time I have used the term "Janus ratio" for the
"to (self/world)"
verb/verbing pair or blur. I quite like it. In this area of the comment I was thinking aloud, not so much hat.
"Janus ratio" It has some prior art in organic chemistry though, on one quick internet search somewheres in https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2019/na/c9na00522f
Anyway, is that the bit I should sense out for you into a dude "made sense" bit?
_________
Here's a petrachian-ish sonnet I wrote for my work’s newsletter...
Your nerves are a ruin of yesterday,
lying on a wrack of regret,
depression lifts no embarrassed relief
so deep as high a statues
you naked
— the wind in your eye.
Yes, you ruined yesterday,
you slap the water and wave.
The kelp becomes us, the world is given me,
I see, another, in other, the flow in notice
leaves, behind, but cold, ebbing on us on,
mooring the moon, for maybe that
scar is better than me…
a crab, the weed; salt eyed but clear.
By
the beloved son of the house
backlink https://open.substack.com/pub/whyweshould/p/the-janus-ratio
___________no spoilers in notes________
Labyrinthine imagery in Petrarch
https://doi.org/10.2307/477886
(with a nod to Piranesi) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Battista_Piranesi
Petrarchian sonnets
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrarchan_sonnet
the labyrinth connects with
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/piranesi-borges-and-the-labyrinths-of-time/
(our org is building a library for 50 000 books)(and stuff)
The word "kelp" was also used directly to refer to these processed ashes [burnt seaweeds]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelp
kelp links with the use of ‘beloved son of the house’ a character who worlds at the expense of their good self, which is from Susanna Clarke’s novel (slipstream?) Piranesi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piranesi_(novel)
“ the world is given me” is a direct quote from a translation of Wittgenstein in
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte. Philosophische Untersuchungen = Philosophical investigations. Rev. 4th ed. Chichester, West Sussex, U.K. ; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.
more here
https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/piranese-the-shepherd-worlding-their
"but doesn’t seem to know about Honesty-Humilty, " hilarious
Yeah that was my hope, right?
"Here read this huge post about factors and names and respondents" = yawn
"Minor Internet celebrities are wrong! Laugh and feel glad you're in the know while you read this huge post about factors and names and respondents" = IDK, what is this again?
"Will we ever see major celebrity the same way after sexy nudie sex video on Instagram? Find out at this clickbait!" = Whoa, like... is this even substack?
It seems unfair to criticize those people, like myself. I know about HEXACO, of course, but why would I talk about it? It's just another factorization. (It's not like any of these are real in any strong sense: there is no 'H' gland in the brain that OCEAN practitioners are denying the existence of!) It's fine, and I have nothing against it, but it's one used by relatively few of the datasets or papers I am interested in, so...
Nor does this post make a good case that I would want to throw the OCEAN factorization out (were that in any way within my power) in favor of HEXACO - why is adding this factor and refactorizing *so* important? What does it *do* for me? Would any claim I have ever made about, say, Conscientiousness, be changed if the same C analysis had instead been doing using the 'C' from a HEXACO inventory...? If not, perhaps you should reflect: are you making a meaningful criticism (https://gwern.net/research-criticism), or just squabbling?
> I know about HEXACO, of course, but why would I talk about it? It's just another factorization.
That is true, yes. By the same token, Eysenck's old E & N model is just another factorization. Is anything meaningful lost by dropping from five replicable factors to two? If the answer is yes, then prima facie, something meaningful is likely also lost by dropping from six replicable factors to five.
> why is adding this factor and refactorizing *so* important? What does it *do* for me?
The addition of the H-factor opens up a large body of research on human behavior, letting you 1. clarify the difference between people who are disagreeable or antagonistic from those who are immoral, 2. understand behaviors beyond sheer criminality which arise from self-centeredness, 3. recognize symptoms and tells for immoral behavior, 4. recognize that the secular left is weighed down by a morality deficit, 5. appreciate utilitarianism has greater appeal to people who are less moral, etc.
Since you've invited me to reflect, I'll comment that while I really do wish more people knew about and understood H, there is a silver lining: the widespread silence regarding H has at least been useful to me as a blogger, as it gives me an open area for discussion. You could very easily benefit from the increased resolution in the HEXACO yourself - there's about twenty years of low hanging fruit on the HEXACO tree.
Lastly, I definitely do understand that it would be quite irritating to have some nobody blogging at some random site called Things to Read accusing you of not knowing things that maybe you really do know very well! In my defense, though, when you ask about the HEXACO, "What does it do for me," that does make me wonder how familiar you really are with what's hanging from that tree.
Yes, but Eysenck's factorization *does* drop topics of interest to me and I can explain why the prima facie assumption is either wrong or right: I'm not very interested in extraversion/introversion at all, but I am interested in intelligence & the intelligentsia, so I need O; and I'm interested in economics and productivity, so I need C. (I have little use for E or A, but some use for N in psychiatry.) Whereas EN omits O/C and doesn't even give me his P factor for psychiatry or behavioral genetics topics! So I can explain quite clearly why his EPN is more interesting to me than EN, and why OCEAN/HEXACO would be more useful than EPN. (I regard it as a bit of a weakness that you can't all that easily get a P-like factor out of OCEAN, but most psychiatry datasets/studies where you'd want a P will be doing diagnoses or MMPI or other things which can substitute for P, and you can't get everything you want in life.)
Meanwhile, most of your H examples don't sound in any of my bailiwicks. You don't mention anything I've written where H would make a major change, and most of your list of examples sounds like things that are more interesting to you than to me. 1/2: I don't think any of my occasional references to crime (or broader anti-social behavior) really hinges on 'disagreeable' vs 'immoral' - mostly for me, the important thing about crime is that it exists as a blackbox and how it responds or doesn't respond to social engineering (and I have little faith that incorporating H would allow much prediction of that); 3: sounds mildly interesting but also a bit dubious & circular (do I really need to appeal to personality inventories to learn how to recognize bad people? especially given their construction?), like saying you can better learn to recognize what 'a hard worker' looks like by reading NEO items; 4/5: the sort of topic I should avoid the temptation, in large part because it tends to produce more heat than light. If this is what the H tree has hanging from it, it sounds like the low-hanging fruit is not so much apples but coconuts - and I don't like coconuts.
> In my defense, though, when you ask about the HEXACO, "What does it do for me," that does make me wonder how familiar you really are with what's hanging from that tree.
Who can be completely familiar with everything? But when I choose my day's reading, things in AI always look far more interesting and important and overfill the day; and when I skim all of the HEXACO studies I cite on gwern.net, I just see ordinary personality studies which look mostly like they would've if they used OCEAN and come with no big surprises.
Still, as much as I am more interested in DL scaling these days, I'm not going to go around citing you as an example of 'Apple Pie is completely ignorant of scaling, what a fool!' unless I had something more specific to say where you were failing. (Which at some point might be true - IMO, by far the most interesting thing to happen in personality psychology in years, if not decades, is the huge greenfield of opportunity represented by LLMs being little brains in boxes that you can do personality & other individual-differences research on _in silico_, representing far richer opportunity for datasets & experimentation than the 'dust bowl empiricism' of psychometrics developed for the age of desk calculators, and if psychologists keep sleeping on it they may find their lunch eaten by economists etc - but is not yet.)
I'm not interested in New Zealand, but that doesn't mean I'm going to use maps that don't include it. You've taken personality tests and reported the results over and over again at https://gwern.net/me#personality . Rather than spending half an hour attempting to defend your lack of knowledge or interest in something that really should be known to most high schoolers, I dunno, maybe you could have just taken the HEXACO and put your numbers on your site?
> I regard it as a bit of a weakness that you can't all that easily get a P-like factor out of OCEAN, but most psychiatry datasets/studies where you'd want a P will be doing diagnoses or MMPI or other things which can substitute for P, and you can't get everything you want in life.)
Frustratingly, even EPN didn't have P; Eysenck's psychoticism really didn't measure what it purported to. I really wish Ashton & Lee would have included some kind of P/oddity/schizotypy/dissociation factor in the HEXACO; they've done factor analyses that find it:
* Ashton, M. C., & Lee, K. (2012). Oddity, Schizotypy/dissociation, and personality. Journal of Personality, 80(1), 113-134.
* Ashton, M. C., Lee, K., de Vries, R. E., Hendrickse, J., & Born, M. P. (2012). The maladaptive personality traits of the Personality Inventory for DSM-5 (PID-5) in relation to the HEXACO personality factors and schizotypy/dissociation. Journal of personality disorders, 26(5), 641-659.
If there were a readily available thing called the HEXACOP, you can bet I would be pushing for it over the HEXACO
> I'm not interested in New Zealand, but that doesn't mean I'm going to use maps that don't include it.
A good example: most of the maps I use *don't* include NZ, and they would be worse if they did. The road map of the USA in my car trunk or the maps in my backup GPS unit? No NZ. The offline Google Maps of London, Oxford, San Francisco I downloaded last year? No NZ. Likewise for NYC, NJ, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia. Google Earth install? No NZ maps cached because I've never needed to even possibly look there (aside from the occasional passing thought wondering what the _Lord of the Ring_ film settings look like these days).
I struggle to think of any time I've genuinely needed to know more about the geography of NZ besides "there's some big islands near the right-hand side of Australia; and there's a lot of sheep". Doubtless there are people to whom the details are important or interesting, beyond just the NZers themselves, but those people have never been me, and looking in the crystal ball, it's unclear they will ever be me.
If you are arguing that H is the NZ of personality factors, then I am happy to agree.
> You've taken personality tests and reported the results over and over again
I've taken Big Five once, as you can see in your link; and I took the others back then because while I was there at Your Morals I might as well do the others and see what they look like. Apparently they didn't include HEXACO, and I don't think I'd learn much from taking it when it's otherwise so similar, nor would it give you a chance to explain why you are so insistent that I ought to find H as interesting as you do.
hey i LOLled
second backlink for this post https://open.substack.com/pub/whyweshould/p/humiliating-the-world
It is for reasons like these that I decided against studying psychology: When I borrowed a psychology text-book in my youth, it seemed bureaucratic and illogical. Exactly for reasons like the one you outlined above, I guess.
Psychology is an interesting field, as compared with other sciences.
On the one hand, it is one of the most genuinely *scientific* fields out there, in the sense of being dedicated to empiricism: All Questions Shall Be Answered By Gathering and Testing Data. To me, this is a big deal. Yes, psychology often falls short. No, studies aren't all carried out in the most honest way, with preregistered hypotheses being directly tested; and much of the data is gleaned from psych 101 students, who aren't fully representative of even the WEIRD nations where all the psychologists live. But plenty of studies are preregistered with clear hypotheses to test, and plenty of the data comes from a very broad range of respondents (the HEXACO was validated in Croatian, Filipino, Greek, Hungarian, Korean, Polish, and Turkish).
Other fields like physics or economics do a lot of mathematical modelling rather than direct empirical tests, and that's not really a very effective way of checking your thinking for cobwebs. It's much easier to run off a theoretical cliff in physics (e.g. string theory), and econ is notorious for this - just about everything in economics is untested or barely tested. The blogosphere is often like this; people write snappy and insightful posts, with all the arguments that attend the truthiest of truths, and it's all basically a giant untested hypothesis. Knowledge just doesn't progress this way.
But looking at psychology in a completely different way, we have... well... your own observation.
Compared to disciplines like philosophy, mathematics, physics, or chemistry, the field of psychology is saturated with what you might call "high-midwits." And the weight of these otherwise well-meaning, passionate, helpful psychologists exerts a palpable drag on the field. Nowhere in my physics coursework was Aristotle mentioned; everyone knew his ideas about physics just weren't relevant at all. But I also took a handful of psych classes in undergrad, and Freud came up half a dozen times. And when all of your contemporaries are talking about Freud, even a brilliant psychologist is going to think, "Freud, huh... Maybe there's something there," rather than just blinking and realizing Freudianism is a prescientific dead end.