mattnewport comments on Let There Be Light - Less Wrong

39 Post author: Alicorn 17 March 2010 07:35PM

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Comment author: HughRistik 17 March 2010 11:51:43PM *  18 points [-]

I'm going to second the recommendation of using psychometrics to further your self-awareness.

For narrowing things down beyond what's been turned up as typical human reactions to things, you can try personality tests like Myers-Briggs or Big Five.

As the Wikipedia articles discuss, Myers-Briggs doesn't enjoy a great reputation among psychologists. Nevertheless, the INTP profile describes me, and probably a lot of people here, with freaky accuracy.

The Big Five is a great recommendation. It is very well respected in psychology, and I find especially useful for understanding disagreements with others. There is a big difference between how intelligent people who are low and high in openness view the world. Furthermore, differences in Agreeableness are a big source of interpersonal conflict.

your intelligence types,

I would stay away from this one. Gardner's notion of multiple intelligences has theoretical problems and does not enjoy empirical support.

categorize your love language

For something scientifically validated on how people handle relationships, check out the concept of attachment style. Here's a quiz. I'm convinced that a lot of relationship problems are due to differences in attachment style, rather than one person being in the right and the other person being in the wrong.

Other individual differences that are useful for self-awareness, and understanding how others think differently:

Comment author: mattnewport 18 March 2010 05:40:25AM 11 points [-]

I find the factors for the big 5 a little odd in that they seem to be arranged in clear good/bad pairs, unlike Myers-Briggs which seems to be more arranged as 'not better, just different'. Maybe I'm suffering from some kind of bias but it seems like one would want to score highly on openness, conscientiousness, extroversion and agreeableness and low on neuroticism. They look more like D&D ability scores than alignments.

Comment author: CytokineStorm 18 March 2010 09:37:52PM *  6 points [-]

Attempts have been made to reduce the Big Five into a "Big One", or "General Factor of Personality"(GFP), this correlates the way you describe it. The neurotism is sometimes called Stability, and this together with the other four correlate with one another. Here's a paper by Rushton et al:

A recent observation is that a General Factor of Personality (GFP) occupies the apex of the personality hierarchy in the same way that g, the general factor of mental ability, occupies the apex in the organization of cognitive abilities. Individuals high on the GFP are characterized as altruistic, emotionally stable, agreeable, conscientious, extraverted, intellectually open, mentally tough, and emotionally intelligent; ...

(I have low GFP: I'm rather miserable...)