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Swimmer963 comments on Negative and Positive Selection - Less Wrong
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Conscientiousness is what you need in order to finish what you start, when what you started is something that somebody else told you to do. When it's your own thing, you need a lot less of it.
As for political savvy -- that isn't required at all. Unless by "research" you mean "political success in the human occupation customarily but misleadingly labeled 'research'." (The "as such" qualifier a few comments above was intended to rule that out.)
This strikes me as untrue for most people. Can you give me examples of people who were not conscientious and were nonetheless able to complete large, multi-step projects?
I actually find myself much more capable of finishing large, multi-step projects when they've got social implications riding on them. I enjoy my private projects more when I'm doing them, but have trouble finishing them if they take more than a few hours of serious work.
The first category does include things that others didn't directly tell me to do, though: there's also things I'm doing as favors to others, public-facing projects I came up with independently, and so on.
Not really the issue in this discussion, which is about the negative effects of a filtering system that excludes a certain small but highly valuable population.
As I've suggested earlier, EY is a pretty good example of the type of personality I have in mind.
Fair enough. The highly valuable 'outliers' are likely going to be different enough from me that I'll have trouble mapping and comparing my traits onto theirs, which makes that kind of comparison not very useful.
You may know better than me, but as far as I can tell, EY does have the ability to coax himself into working productively on projects that aren't necessarily a lot of fun all the time. He just won't do it for any goal that that he doesn't consider important. He strikes me more as someone who dislikes authority figures and cares less about the typical social reinforcement that comes of achieving more "conventional" goals, like going to university.
Yes, exactly. This is exactly the kind of story that such folks will tell about themselves.
Whereas, by contrast, the "conscientious" have enough willpower resources to spare for tasks that others consider "important" for them to do, as well.