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Nornagest comments on Intrinsic motivation is crucial for overcoming akrasia - Less Wrong
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I know that many researchers know something about PCA. I do think that it's not applied nearly enough (c.f. Sarah's remarks about Asperger's Syndrome, which was removed from the DSM a few years after she made her post). The main issue to my mind is that when people apply it in psychology they seem to come into it with preconceived notions concerning what they might find, rather than collecting large and diverse datasets, letting it speak for itself, and then trying to interpret what the principal components mean in human terms.
Consider the construct of conscientiousness. It's very suspicious that it maps onto a prexisting notion, and it's just not that predictive. I got lots of C's and D's in school, but worked 90 hours a week for 12 weeks on my speed dating project. Am I conscientious? ;-) As far as I can tell, they came up with questions based on preconceived notions, then did factor analysis, and came up with a construct that some meaning, while being very far from carving reality at its joints.
Is it? We've been modeling each other as long as language has existed. Conscientiousness might not correspond to a single well-defined causal system in the brain, but it would be no surprise to me at all to find common words in most languages for close empirical clusters in personality-space. And the Big 5 factors are very much empirical constructs, not causal.
Ok, I guess what I mean is that it's suspicious that it maps onto a preexisting notion held by the general population, in the same way that it would be suspicious for psychology research to apparently show the existence of demon possession (which humans have in fact believed in). I wouldn't find it suspicious if it mapped onto a notion of someone with demonstrated exceptional ability to read and connect with people (e.g. Bill Clinton).
The way scientific progress occurs is by developing progressively more refined understandings of what's going on: for example, passing from the Ptolemaic model of the stars and planets to the Copernican model to the Newtonian model to Einstein's theory of general relativity. One can't hope to understand reality if one isn't flexible enough to recognize that things might be very different from how they initially appear.