thomblake comments on 2012 Survey Results - Less Wrong

80 Post author: Yvain 07 December 2012 09:04PM

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Comment author: Kindly 29 November 2012 10:14:33PM 3 points [-]

Fishing for correlations is a statistically dubious practice, but also fun. Some interesting ones (none were very high, except e.g. Father Age and Mother Age):

  • IQ and Hours Writing have correlation 0.26 (75 degrees), which is the only interesting IQ correlation.
  • Siblings and Older siblings have correlation 0.48 (61 degrees), which isn't too surprising , but makes me wonder: do we expect this correlation to be 0.5 in general?
  • Most of the Big Five answers are slightly correlated (around +/-0.25, or 90+/-15 degrees) with each other, but not with anything else except the Autism Score. Shouldn't well-designed personality traits be orthogonal, ideally?
  • CFAR question 7 (guess of height of redwood) was negatively correlated with Height (-0.23, or 103 degrees). No notable correlation with the random number, though.
Comment author: thomblake 29 November 2012 10:18:54PM 5 points [-]

Most of the Big Five answers are slightly correlated (around +/-0.25, or 90+/-15 degrees) with each other, but not with anything else except the Autism Score. Shouldn't well-designed personality traits be orthogonal, ideally?

It might just pick out the cluster of "Less Wrong personality type".

CFAR question 7 (guess of height of redwood) was negatively correlated with Height

Obviously it's a matter of perspective. Tall people just tower over those redwoods.

Comment author: Kindly 29 November 2012 10:26:43PM 3 points [-]

It might just pick out the cluster of "Less Wrong personality type".

In that case, it says something about the cluster as well. For example, Openness and Extraversion wouldn't be positively correlated just because most LWers are both open and extraverted (or because most LWers are closed and introverted). We'd have to have something that specifically makes "open and extraverted" more likely to happen together than individually.

Comment author: [deleted] 30 November 2012 12:26:04AM 3 points [-]

Something like Berkson's paradox (people who are neither open nor introverted are unlikely to read LW)?

Comment author: Kindly 30 November 2012 01:21:41AM 2 points [-]

Good point. Objection retracted (in the conversational sense).

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