I accepted for decades that having people play economic payoff matrix games in laboratories with strangers was an accurate way to measure abstract personal traits like generosity, risk aversion, trust, prosociality, etc.
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But maybe it’s an even weirder idea to think that those abstract nouns even ARE pervasive, persistent traits, as opposed to a mess of contexts and contradictions
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Well some abstract nouns are Lindy so there’s that
Like ‘generous’ I think is at least as coherent as ‘blue’
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yes but when researchers find that e.g. their teenage male subjects YOLO more in public goods games I don’t know if that makes them more generous or just more bored
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and the abstract nouns themselves are fine and useful - they just need to be protected from bad research methods claiming to speak for them in general
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