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Mass_Driver comments on On the Openness personality trait & 'rationality' - Less Wrong
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You're right, of course, but the case has already been made in just about every freshman psychology textbook.
It is reasonable to assume that an educated member of the general public will be familiar with the Big Five personality traits, and that a typical LW reader will have noted and remembered the Big Five as one of a handful of psychological 'findings' that actually do have demonstrable explanatory power. There is moderately compelling evidence that they are, e.g., heritable, that they can be affected by drugs, that they correlate strongly across cultures, years, and survey versions, and that they can be used to prospectively predict various mental disorders and success rates. The Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits does a reasonably good job of documenting this. The Big Five are also the lead feature in Chapter 2 of "Psychology Applied to Modern Life," (10th ed.), which I believe has been strongly recommended on LW before.
No doubt you meant well, but by suggesting that gwern used a "fuzzy label that one likes to attribute and then rationalize as having explanatory power," you also suggest that gwern is indulging in sloppy mental habits and that gwern's article lacks an appropriate foundation. Neither suggestion is really fair; the Big Five personality theory is so well-established that there is nothing improper, even among us skeptics, about relying on it and building on it to make a series of interesting points.
This shouldn't be a problem, I believe. To the extent it becomes objectionable to doubt anyone's sanity without a solid case, we are losing ability to guard against error. It should be a routine matter, like washing your hands.
Objections have been voiced and not addressed. Not just here but on the WP page as well.
Given these, plus Miller's sloppiness in using "costly signaling" verbiage, I must agree with Nesov's objections. The post wants to lead us to some conclusions, but these are only vaguely implied not stated, and the heavy use of quotations from the book, wall-o-text fashion, distracts from noticing that the post doesn't really get to any particular point.
Those WP criticisms seem surprisingly weak.
Which ones specifically seem weak? The problems with "garbage in, garbage out" and the lack of explanatory power of factor analysis seem serious enough to me. Basically, the WP page says that there is no "Big Five personality theory", contrary to what the comment by Mass_Driver suggests.
What there is is a bunch of questionnaire items, the answers to which seem to somewhat reliably predict the answers to other questionnaire items when subjected to CFA; the label "Openness" for instance is arbitrarily given to one of those five "factors", and if you look at the "Sample openness items" from the WP page it's not clear that any of these questions in fact have to do with a person's being open to new experiences.
If people claim that it is an all encompassing model, then that would be a serious criticism. I don't actually know if researchers claim that, but it seems unlikely to me.
This is a weaker criticism than it seems. It stems from using classical stats. Latent factor (such as FA) models are less confusing from a Bayesian point of view. The particular indeterminacy they are talking about disappears when you specify a model and prior more clearly and try to update in a principled manner. A better criticism would be that the results of personality models might be sensitive to model assumptions. However, that sensitivity is an empirical matter and isn't established by referencing the indeterminacy of FA. Another good criticism of Big Five research might be that factor analysis is not a good tool because it could be hard to figure out how sensitive your results are to the particular analysis.
This doesn't seems like a criticism to me.
What I'd like to know, primarily, is whether the Big Five traits correlate with anything other than answers to questionnaire items: in particular, actual behavior.
Pointer to studies appreciated; Google hasn't turned up much. Some studies of job performance have C having the kind of influence you'd expect, then there's things like this.
I think Bryan Caplan talks about the Big Five some and is usually pretty clear thinking. He has a paper on the topic which gives some references for correlations between the Big Five and other things. For example:
And
I'd be interested in hearing if you find interesting results.
I am also interested in that. My impression from hearing people talk about such things is that yes, they do, but I don't actually know much about this area. That result is interesting.
Not just weak, but confused, and not even clearly criticisms, as they look more like snarky suggestions for improvement (might be Wikipedia page's framing).