= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Bugmaster comments on On the Openness personality trait & 'rationality' - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (95)
Call me "daft", then, because I still don't get it. Does the "big five" model have any predictive power at all ? Does knowing the approximate position of a person in this five-dimensional space help us discover anything else about the person -- specifically, something that we can verify empirically ? I'm not singling out the "big five" model for criticism; I'd ask the same question of Myers-Briggs, or enneagrams, or horoscopes. If your model has no predictive power, then it's not very useful, regardless of how elegant it is.
Sure, but only in the same sense that terminology like "rubes" and "bleggs" does. I more specifically meant that it has no explanatory predictive power -- i.e., it doesn't really tell you that, say, "Openness" is a valid physical construct in people's brains, and not an accidental byproduct of some combination of other factors that are harder for us to notice.
I think this all depends on what your model predicts and with what accuracy. To use an analogy, a thing like "temperature" doesn't really exist -- it's just an illusion caused by the motion of particles -- but it's still a very useful concept. In most cases, we can close our eyes and pretend that "temperature" is a measurement that really does refer to some physical quantity out in the real world.
So, is "Openness" (or any other of the Big Five axes) like "Temperature" ? Can we even measure a person's "Openness" value reliably ? If so, what does it tell us ? What verifiable predictions can we make based on it ?
In the case of Myers-Briggs, AFAIK, the answers are "no", "nothing much", and "none". In the case of temperature, we can definitely answer "yes" to the first question, and list a whole bunch of things like melting points and specific heat values etc. in response to the other two.
Well yes, but the average kinetic energy does exist. So it just turns out that temperature didn't quite mean what we thought it means.