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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I don’t think you can get at that through behavioral data at all. You have to straight up ask about intent and interpret sincerity. The weak link is assuming rather than testing what the nouns point to, not that the nouns as commonly used are necessarily incoherent.
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I agree with this - I think they can be coherent (in their contexts) without being susceptible to a good hard sciencing
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