I regret having only one upvote to give to these wonderful gems you keep digging up gwern. When ems of you are available on the market I'll buy at least two.
I think it's time for a meta-post in which gwern discusses summarizing articles and gives advice.
eminent scientists tend to be
Base rate?
I think it's time for a meta-post in which gwern discusses summarizing articles and gives advice.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/5me/scholarship_how_to_do_it_efficiently/ is pretty good, IMO.
That's advice for the skimming/reading/intensive study of 1,000 papers to get their knowledge, balancing completeness, depth, breadth, and the like.
I want advice on summarizing 100 individual articles, each one fairly completely read, so that many other people can do that and share the results with each other. The thing you do best, rather than the thing lukeprog does best.
Hm. I dunno then. I read, excerpt the interesting bits, and paste them into a file. Is there anything else to explain?
"Scientists are curious and passionate and ready to argue":
This psychological assessment owes nothing to surveys or personality testing; it pays no heed to the zodiac. Instead, researchers took the linguistic data from 200 tweets each of nearly 130,000 Twitter users across more than 3,500 occupations to assess their “personality digital fingerprints”.
They used machine learning to identify the traits and values that distinguish professions from each other.
This “21st century approach for matching one’s personality with congruent occupations,” dubbed the robot career adviser, is more reliable than existing career guidance methods based on self-reports through questionnaires, the researchers argue in a January paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Personality characteristics of Twitter users were inferred using IBM Watson's Personality Insights tool. The study focused on five specific traits (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness) and five values (helping others, tradition, taking pleasure in life, achieving success, and excitement).
The analysis revealed that scientists combine low agreeableness and low conscientiousness with high openness.
“The combination is characteristic of people who tend to be unconventional and quirky, consistent with the image of scientists as curious and even sometimes eccentric boffins,” says one of the authors, Paul McCarthy+, an adjunct professor at the University of New South Wales (UNSW Sydney) in Australia. “In some ways it does confirm stereotypes.”
Within the sciences, a spectrum of personality traits emerged. Those dealing with more abstract or inanimate things (mathematicians, geologists) were more open than those in the life sciences (bio-statisticians, horticulturalists), who “tended to be more extroverted and agreeable”, says McCarthy.
Scientists and software programmers, whose personality characteristics aligned closely, were generally more open to experiencing a variety of new activities, tended to think in symbols and abstractions, and found repetition boring, the researchers found.
On the spectrum of occupations, scientists are especially different from professional tennis players. “Tennis professionals are a lot more agreeable and conscientious than all others in the study — especially scientists,” says McCarthy.
“It makes sense, because to be a tennis player, you have to be highly conscientious and be willing to take direction, whereas scientists are almost the complete opposite. They don’t take direction, their openness to experiences is very high, but so is their openness to being disagreeable.”
He noted that the occupation of research director had the highest median openness scores of any of the 3,513 occupations in the study.
"Now for the matter of drive. You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, "How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?" He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, "You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years." I simply slunk out of the office!
What Bode was saying was this: "Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest." Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this."
Richard Hamming, "You and Your Research". (Note that Hamming is, of course, talking about top scientists, not people in general - so he's assuming that the basic thresholds for IQ and Openness are already met, even though I doubt he ever conceptualized that explicitly.)
We’ve discussed the Big Five in the past, such as the relationship of Openness to parasites & signaling or whether hallucinogens increase Openness and parasites decrease it, along with my little notes on the value of Conscientiousness. This is another entry in the topic of ‘what is Big Five good for’.
I researched the topic of how and whether Conscientiousness and Openness correlate with scientific achievement for Luke for the Intelligence Explosion paper; here is some of what I found:
“Creativity, Intelligence, and Personality”, 1981 review:
I found this one amusing:
An embarrassment of riches; no summary, but a starting point if one needs more:
“How development and personality influence scientific thought, interest, and achievement”, GJ Feist, Review of General Psychology, 2006; important bits start on pg 9:
Pretty substantial. The 26 study meta-analysis was Feist, G. J. (1998). “A meta-analysis of the impact of personality on scientific and artistic creativity”. Personality and Social Psychological Review, 2, 290–309
Feist 1998 was also cited in a chapter of The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity, “the relationship between creativity and intelligence”, but I couldn’t get the book; further reading, if anyone wants some.
One useful bit from Feist; I also ran into a lot of CP Benbow-keyworded studies of the gifted SMPY cohorts to the effect that the kids’ early interest in science predicts later careers in science, which would tie in nicely to this:
“Scientific talent, training, and performance: Intellect, personality, and genetic endowment”, Simonton 2008; the abstract caught my eye:
“Bouchard & Lykken 1999” = Bouchard, T. J., Jr., & Lykken, D. T. (1999). “Genetic and environmental influence on correlates of creativity”. In N. Colangelo & S. G. Assouline (Eds.), Talent development III: Proceedings from the 1995 Henry B. & Jocelyn Wallace National Symposium on Talent Development (pp. 81–97). I couldn’t find this, but I did find http://cogprints.org/611/1/genius.html which describes it a little more (C-f ‘in press’).
Moving onwards, pg 9–12 discuss Feist 1998’s meta-analysis:
Concluding: