Yvain comments on Open Thread, June 16-30, 2013 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: Dorikka 16 June 2013 04:45AM

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Comment author: Yvain 18 June 2013 07:10:26AM *  6 points [-]

On the other hand, here's a study that shows a very strong link between impulse control and weight. I'm not really sure what to believe anymore.

Comment author: gwern 18 June 2013 08:39:21PM 6 points [-]

The impulse control they use is a facet of Conscientiousness; and we already know Conscientiousness is highly heritable...

Comment author: AspiringRationalist 19 June 2013 04:24:49AM 5 points [-]

Yes, but it is still potentially useful to know how much of the heritability is metabolically vs. behaviorally manifested.

Also more generally, we should be careful about mixing different levels of causation.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 18 June 2013 12:02:06PM 2 points [-]

Unless I'm missing something, they don't describe the size of the effects of personality that they found, just the strength of the correlations.

Comment author: gwern 18 June 2013 08:42:42PM 1 point [-]

I'm not too clear on how to interpret hierarchical model coefficients, but they do give at least one description of effect size, on pg6:

These associations revealed clinically meaningful differences in weight. For example, participants who scored in the top 10% of Neuroticism's Impulsiveness weighed, on average, over 11 Kg more than those who scored in the lowest 10% of this trait. Likewise, participants who scored high on Conscientiousness's Order weighed about 4.5 Kg less than those who scored low on Order.

and pg8:

In addition, the emotional aspects of impulsivity (N5: Impulsiveness and E5: Excitement-Seeking) were also associated with greater increases in adiposity. For example, on average, at age 30, those who scored one standard deviation above the mean on impulsivity had a BMI that was approximately 2.30 points higher than those who scored one standard deviation below the mean on this trait. By age 90, this gap increased to a 5.22 BMI point difference (see Figure 3).

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 19 June 2013 12:10:01AM 0 points [-]

Thanks. Those differences are small compared to common differences of BMI, though.

Comment author: gwern 19 June 2013 01:17:05AM 0 points [-]

Well, yeah, you should've expected that from the small correlations.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 19 June 2013 02:30:31AM 1 point [-]

I don't have much knowledge of statistics. You may have forgotten what that's like.

Comment author: [deleted] 18 June 2013 03:18:37PM 0 points [-]

In principle, something (e.g. how much the mother eats during the pregnancy) might affect both those things, with no causal pathway from one down to the other.