It has the right kind of ontological trajectory to eventually converge with neuroscience based thinking about the architecture of the brain rather than its socially embodied heat signatures. It’s a “Greek terms for fMRI ghosts” kind of wrongness. It’s wrong about the right things
Conversation
Big5 otoh fundamentally isn’t interested in personality as a property of brains at all, anymore than astrology is interested in stars. Both are interested in influencing human affairs with whatever authority they can muster, at the most leveraged loci.
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Astrologers wanted to influence how kings governed. Big5 wants to influence how bureaucrats govern. Both sought/seek ascriptive institutional authority by complicating techniques beyond amateur accessibility and create and protect *exclusive* access to power.
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It is revealing that though Myers-Briggs has a sketchy private corp grifting at the heart of it, the ideas themselves are accessible to amateurs, not policed, and have roots in an older open tradition (Freud, Jung, all the way back to I Ching type divination). It’s honest.
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The situation is even clearer in Strauss-Howe generational theory (and other cycle theories of history…, Turchin, hell even Kondratriev and Elliot wave theories).
Pointing to the detailed “noise” of history to criticize these things isn’t as impressive as you think.
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Empirical data are always *about* some theoretical commitments and concepts. If you can’t articulate those commitments explicitly you can easily delude yourself that you’re doing phenomenology rather than “undeclared” (and usually terrible) theory.
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Doing actual phenomenology is *incredibly hard*. It’s hard in the way meditation is hard. If you’re doing any kind of pre-theoretical quantitative studies, the chances are 99% (heh heh I measured this to 3-sigma!) that you’re doing undeclared theory, not phenomenology.
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Numbers without clearly identified clean-edged concepts they’re about are a “tell” of pre-theory. There’s a reason meditation only involves ritual use of numbers at best, not actual math. If you’re doing statistics you’re doing theory, whether or not you know what theory it is.
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The linguistic dimension of this whole line of thought is imo as important as the replication crisis on bad math and experimental design. Follow for this and read this seminal paper on the “generalizability crisis” where the trail starts psyarxiv.com/jqw35/
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I’m personally less interested in criticism of the bad research (good public service being done there) than in just learning to think better around alchemy-stage topics, where there’s a limit to available conceptual clarity and therefore to the value of empirical rigor.
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I’m obviously not shy about this. My main stock-in-trade is obviously midwit-grade phlogistons like 2x2s, memes, weasel words like “strategy” and “mediocre” and so on. So how to play in this swamp without turning dishonest? How to avoid for eg temptation of “Big 5 of strategy”?
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My main rule of rigor is: don’t load concepts with more stress than they can bear. Don’t run big surveys and do multiple regressions on a 2x2 invented in a shitpost. Explore it in jokes, free form essays, even fiction. This is a matter of both taste and honest intentions.
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Taste is easy to cultivate with just practice. The hard part is avoiding temptations. If you want to land a big 6-figure consulting deal based on a proposal based on a shitpost 2x2… you’re guaranteed to add dishonest rigor to words and numbers.
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Honest intentions here can be of 2 types:
1. Don’t succumb to temptation, keep it play
2. Admit it at least to yourself and own the grift. I can respect that.
What I can’t respect is fooling yourself that you’re doing rigorous, research while in denial about grifting
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