I think it's a quite general and important historical fact that disagreeable smart women have historically been much less socially and professionally accepted than disagreeable smart men. I saw this firsthand in the 1990s and 2000s tech industry -- there was an enormous sexist double standard in how much of an asshole you could be and still get promoted.
The gradual recognition of this fact was one of the things that powered the 2010s drive to reform tech to be less sexist. The problem is that rather than fixing the double standard by being more accepting of disagreeable women, they fixed it by becoming less accepting of disagreeable men, which as Dale notes, is a bad thing for innovation in both academia and tech.
I ended up in my last years as a Big Tech manager having to fight quite hard, and sometimes unsuccessfully, to get some of my best engineers well deserved promotions in the face of rather thin circumstantial evidence that they might be One Of Those Guys. The really frustrating thing was that I often could not get enough concrete detail about that evidence to substantively contextualize or refute it *or* to help the engineers in question work on their social skills. This was, as you might guess because giving blunt and specific negative social feedback had itself become a signal of disagreeableness and therefore frowned upon!
This is part of the downside of trying to hang all of this on the Big5 Personality traits. The first problem is that the Psychologists really want to talk about something that doesn't change very much over your lifetime, and why not, it's what the Big5 theory has going for it over others like Myers-Briggs. The second problem is that the terminology used for the traits -- except for Neuroticism -- makes them sound very desirable. 'Agreeable' doesn't sound like 'duplicitous inauthentic sycophant' while 'Disagreeable' sounds like 'Egotistical Jerk'. A certain amount of conscientiousness is a good thing, and the sort of lack of conscientiousness that is tied to poor impulse control leads to a host of bad outcomes. However, a good number of the people who test the best at conscientiousness are completely lacking in imagination. They never left a job unfinished because they got bored. They aren't getting good outcomes in life, either, and often complain about the lack of opportunities. You investigate and discover that a lot of their problem is that they never notice the opportunities they are getting, through a single-minded focus on the job at hand.
But the good thing is that psychological traits are not destiny. You really can train to be more disciplined. Or to notice more, and focus less. Or even to be more disagreeable -- though that one is really going to need a new name before we can get people to believe that it is something that they would benefit from learning. (Aside from the people who are already first-rate jerks, who will likely attend in droves.)
Note on the feminism point: there are loads of kinds, I get it, I tried to advert to that reality but clearly failed. What I wanted to bring out was who feminism worked for/helped most in Western countries.
According to Dale, trait conscientiousness is moderately heritable, and executive function is highly heritable. This raises the question of why there're people who're low in conscientiousness and EF. Is there some evolutionary advantage to low levels of these? If not, it seems as though natural selection would've given all of us high conscientiousness and EF.
It's a good question; I'll throw out a couple possibilities:
First, it's possible that these traits are/have not been under strong selection pressure, or that there are tradeoffs - i.e. being at one end of the distribution is good in some environments but bad in others.
What's the downside of very high conscientiousness? Focusing on getting all the details right can obscure big picture thinking, and obsession with orderliness could lead to authoritarian impulses.
For EF, having high analytical intelligence means that one is generally well adapted to modern WEIRD society, but that is less true in other times and places. And even now it's generally more correlated with achieving status but not having more grandchildren.
I think moderate to high conscientiousness is the sweet spot. Too much conscientiousness and one can’t cut losses , or walk away from a project that isn’t working. One doesn’t want to be a slave to a plan or other expectations. Especially if you can get someone else to finish the work for you while you move on to the next interesting thing.
If you think executive functioning is your ability to accomplish your goals, it sounds like an unalloyed good. But why believe that identification? Perhaps it is your ability to accomplish other people's goals.
Is a tacit assumption that paternalism needs to be coerced, ie government driven. That seems to be the worst of both worlds, forcing paternalism on those who do worst with it while not giving people who do want some the particular type they need.
A less bad solution seems to be no coerced paternalism but the ability to select into paternalistic arrangements. Working for a company instead of being self employed is one example; joining the military for structure is another. Even just joining a church that is fairly attentive to your behaviors meets the criteria. Those are just off the top of my head… add in AA come think of it… as exist in a world with heavy amounts of state paternalism. Mutual aid societies were a 19-20th century example.
Anyway, just saying that I agree that some people, maybe the majority, don’t want freedom but fair masters (or other paters) but that doesn’t imply that the state needs to act as their masters, which seems to be the default expectation.
Didn't Aristotle famously say that most people are natural slaves? Which I took to mean, roughly, that most people want to be directed and cared for in some manner.
And he wasn't speaking of the kind of chattel savery of the US.
Indeed, although maybe slaves would be better translated as "servants." I think it is largely true that most people are not terribly self directed. Very few people start their own businesses instead of working for someone else and all. Arguably even when most people were small land hold farmers and the like they weren't really very self directed but following the needs of their stock and fields, doing the same thing over and over.
I think that the key point though is that the leader/follower relationship is created voluntarily and privately just as well as coercively through government (or actual slavery), and to better effects.
Not sure I agree with describing the typical woke activist type as high intelligence, low conscientiousness. For example, just last week Noah Smith wrote about the contemptible character David Austin Walsh, a guy who got his PhD in American history at Princeton, writes a bunch of harangues about white supremacist oppression, and then complains that he can't get a tenure track job because he's white. Despite the obvious irony here, he's clearly a smart guy and highly conscientious. My contention would be that there are a lot of people out there like him. If identity politics nonsense were merely confined to dilettantes, it wouldn't have conquered universities, corporate HR departments, and government bureaucracies so quickly.
That’s a good point. The best I can figure is that thinking through the implications of ideas is not something even intelligent people do well. Lots of apparently smart people never seem to realize that the same rule their political leaders used against their enemies can be used against them when their enemies are in power, for instance. It might be that such thought is a learned skill?
I don’t know, I don’t find it super convincing, either.
There is a particular archtype you must have run into. They think that wisdom is a crutch for those who are not sufficiently intelligent. (In D&D terms, it is where they
parked their garbage stat. :) ) When they head off to university they are entirely oblivious to the fairly obvious fact that if you educate a fool, all you are guaranteed to get is a well-educated fool. You cannot study for the wisdom-acquisition test -- you have to make room for becoming wiser in your soul, and it will take a certain humility that many of the most foolish intelligent people do not have at all.
That's an excellent point. Some people you can teach what to think, but not how to think, or even what to think about.
I do wonder if one could teach wisdom to an extent, or at least train it. Maybe by putting people through a lot of experiences that highlight how little they really know and understand, how many vastly different nonergodic systems there are, and just how complex reality can be. The biggest trouble is evaluating how well the training is working, perhaps.
This sort of ‘practical wisdom’ is what military training aims to give new soldiers. Given a normal level of intelligence and humility, it works. But some recruits are too stupid to learn, and some are too egotistical.
Military experience is what I was thinking of as a base, yes. It seems to work pretty well for some, so I had thought that if one could generalize it into a sort of program for generalized wisdom in social affairs, business, military matters, whatever, that would be really valuable. Boiling it down to a six week summer camp for teens might be asking too much, but something. How to teach my girls not to be fools, basically, and then how to teach other people's kids. (And know you actually did it, not just claim you did it and give them a little certificate :D )
Farming is pretty much based on a kind of generalized wisdom, I think. And you 'learn' that wisdom without necessarily earning much of your own by spending a lot of time with a wise farmer. Probably a close relative. And wise farmers, in my experience, let the young 'earn' some wisdom the hard way. By making mistakes and having to fix them.
I think this was the original rationale in the Outward Bound program. But I have never read any studies on how successful it has been in accomplishing this.
Some are too intelligent as well, it's why they screen out high IQ along with independently wealthy. Einstein wouldn't have made a good laundry specialist for twenty years, nor Musk.
Yeah - as someone once posted, "it takes a lot of conscientiousness to spend the entire day screaming at people on Twitter dot com." Low conscientiousness does not describe "wokies" very well.
That's... actually a good question. Does it? I would think it would be low conscientiousness, because Twitter gives such instant feed back and the constant stream of new, so while people are doing the same general thing (screaming at people) they are getting rapid rewards and jumping from topic to topic very quickly. That would seem like low conscientious behavior, as opposed to say putting together a well researched response.
Then again, maybe the low conscientious move would just be to get mad, dislike the post, write "U R an idiot!" and then wander off?
I honestly don't know how conscientiousness applies here :D
Yea, I'd have to be much more of an expert on this personality framework to push back at this because I think both of our interpretations are plausible. I do think that it's dangerous to equate conscientiousness with organizational skills (as I think Arnold does in the OP).
Look at it this way: A certain number of natural grifters may exhibit high intelligence and high conscientiousness. Grifting is just another career. But what happens when one IDavid Austin Walsh) 'applies' himself to a particular grift that he can't control?
He can see the grift working for others, he just can't see that one of his own constituent components will be blocking him. After all, there's a lot of yelling about being white allies.
Note that Adam Grant’s central thesis in Give and Take is that what he calls “disagreeable givers” are essential hires in any organization. Same conclusion, from the MBA/management science perspective.
Where do self destructive libertarians who have little self control but believe root and branch in anarchocapitalism go in this model? I generally agree with the sentiment/the idea - people have feelings, then they search for belief systems and arguments that honor those feelings. Which is why academia is supposed to be so important - it's supposed to be a whole segment of society that can detach their feelings from their analysis of concepts and try to get at the truth.
For the past eight or so years I've been convinced that treating people's political interests as aspects of their personality rather than deeply thought through first principles that they hold is the only way to stay sane while talking about politics. Otherwise things get mutually incomprehensible pretty quickly.
"Woke & Smart?" I wish this word "smart" didn't get applied so liberally these days - to merely mean someone who might score high on an IQ test. When I was young, to be smart meant that you were nobody's fool. People who lack the wisdom and self-awareness to figure out how and why they have allowed themselves to be seduced by fashionable but patently absurd beliefs are not smart.....just foolish.
It's a strange coincidence that the people who feel its their responsibility to determine who is "smart" (in the professional world--psychologists, educators etc.) miraculously always assess themselves as being very "smart."
I think it's a quite general and important historical fact that disagreeable smart women have historically been much less socially and professionally accepted than disagreeable smart men. I saw this firsthand in the 1990s and 2000s tech industry -- there was an enormous sexist double standard in how much of an asshole you could be and still get promoted.
The gradual recognition of this fact was one of the things that powered the 2010s drive to reform tech to be less sexist. The problem is that rather than fixing the double standard by being more accepting of disagreeable women, they fixed it by becoming less accepting of disagreeable men, which as Dale notes, is a bad thing for innovation in both academia and tech.
I ended up in my last years as a Big Tech manager having to fight quite hard, and sometimes unsuccessfully, to get some of my best engineers well deserved promotions in the face of rather thin circumstantial evidence that they might be One Of Those Guys. The really frustrating thing was that I often could not get enough concrete detail about that evidence to substantively contextualize or refute it *or* to help the engineers in question work on their social skills. This was, as you might guess because giving blunt and specific negative social feedback had itself become a signal of disagreeableness and therefore frowned upon!
Thank-you for this thoughtful and informative comment.
This is part of the downside of trying to hang all of this on the Big5 Personality traits. The first problem is that the Psychologists really want to talk about something that doesn't change very much over your lifetime, and why not, it's what the Big5 theory has going for it over others like Myers-Briggs. The second problem is that the terminology used for the traits -- except for Neuroticism -- makes them sound very desirable. 'Agreeable' doesn't sound like 'duplicitous inauthentic sycophant' while 'Disagreeable' sounds like 'Egotistical Jerk'. A certain amount of conscientiousness is a good thing, and the sort of lack of conscientiousness that is tied to poor impulse control leads to a host of bad outcomes. However, a good number of the people who test the best at conscientiousness are completely lacking in imagination. They never left a job unfinished because they got bored. They aren't getting good outcomes in life, either, and often complain about the lack of opportunities. You investigate and discover that a lot of their problem is that they never notice the opportunities they are getting, through a single-minded focus on the job at hand.
But the good thing is that psychological traits are not destiny. You really can train to be more disciplined. Or to notice more, and focus less. Or even to be more disagreeable -- though that one is really going to need a new name before we can get people to believe that it is something that they would benefit from learning. (Aside from the people who are already first-rate jerks, who will likely attend in droves.)
Me being routinely called antagonistic instead of disagreeable is not, then, an improvement?
"confrontational" is another alternative, if still a hard sell
Gosh Arnold thanks for this encomium!
Note on the feminism point: there are loads of kinds, I get it, I tried to advert to that reality but clearly failed. What I wanted to bring out was who feminism worked for/helped most in Western countries.
According to Dale, trait conscientiousness is moderately heritable, and executive function is highly heritable. This raises the question of why there're people who're low in conscientiousness and EF. Is there some evolutionary advantage to low levels of these? If not, it seems as though natural selection would've given all of us high conscientiousness and EF.
A little bit of carelessness can sometimes produce lucky accidents.
It's a good question; I'll throw out a couple possibilities:
First, it's possible that these traits are/have not been under strong selection pressure, or that there are tradeoffs - i.e. being at one end of the distribution is good in some environments but bad in others.
What's the downside of very high conscientiousness? Focusing on getting all the details right can obscure big picture thinking, and obsession with orderliness could lead to authoritarian impulses.
For EF, having high analytical intelligence means that one is generally well adapted to modern WEIRD society, but that is less true in other times and places. And even now it's generally more correlated with achieving status but not having more grandchildren.
I think moderate to high conscientiousness is the sweet spot. Too much conscientiousness and one can’t cut losses , or walk away from a project that isn’t working. One doesn’t want to be a slave to a plan or other expectations. Especially if you can get someone else to finish the work for you while you move on to the next interesting thing.
If you think executive functioning is your ability to accomplish your goals, it sounds like an unalloyed good. But why believe that identification? Perhaps it is your ability to accomplish other people's goals.
I am a little confused as to why there
Is a tacit assumption that paternalism needs to be coerced, ie government driven. That seems to be the worst of both worlds, forcing paternalism on those who do worst with it while not giving people who do want some the particular type they need.
A less bad solution seems to be no coerced paternalism but the ability to select into paternalistic arrangements. Working for a company instead of being self employed is one example; joining the military for structure is another. Even just joining a church that is fairly attentive to your behaviors meets the criteria. Those are just off the top of my head… add in AA come think of it… as exist in a world with heavy amounts of state paternalism. Mutual aid societies were a 19-20th century example.
Anyway, just saying that I agree that some people, maybe the majority, don’t want freedom but fair masters (or other paters) but that doesn’t imply that the state needs to act as their masters, which seems to be the default expectation.
Didn't Aristotle famously say that most people are natural slaves? Which I took to mean, roughly, that most people want to be directed and cared for in some manner.
And he wasn't speaking of the kind of chattel savery of the US.
Indeed, although maybe slaves would be better translated as "servants." I think it is largely true that most people are not terribly self directed. Very few people start their own businesses instead of working for someone else and all. Arguably even when most people were small land hold farmers and the like they weren't really very self directed but following the needs of their stock and fields, doing the same thing over and over.
I think that the key point though is that the leader/follower relationship is created voluntarily and privately just as well as coercively through government (or actual slavery), and to better effects.
Not sure I agree with describing the typical woke activist type as high intelligence, low conscientiousness. For example, just last week Noah Smith wrote about the contemptible character David Austin Walsh, a guy who got his PhD in American history at Princeton, writes a bunch of harangues about white supremacist oppression, and then complains that he can't get a tenure track job because he's white. Despite the obvious irony here, he's clearly a smart guy and highly conscientious. My contention would be that there are a lot of people out there like him. If identity politics nonsense were merely confined to dilettantes, it wouldn't have conquered universities, corporate HR departments, and government bureaucracies so quickly.
That’s a good point. The best I can figure is that thinking through the implications of ideas is not something even intelligent people do well. Lots of apparently smart people never seem to realize that the same rule their political leaders used against their enemies can be used against them when their enemies are in power, for instance. It might be that such thought is a learned skill?
I don’t know, I don’t find it super convincing, either.
There is a particular archtype you must have run into. They think that wisdom is a crutch for those who are not sufficiently intelligent. (In D&D terms, it is where they
parked their garbage stat. :) ) When they head off to university they are entirely oblivious to the fairly obvious fact that if you educate a fool, all you are guaranteed to get is a well-educated fool. You cannot study for the wisdom-acquisition test -- you have to make room for becoming wiser in your soul, and it will take a certain humility that many of the most foolish intelligent people do not have at all.
That's an excellent point. Some people you can teach what to think, but not how to think, or even what to think about.
I do wonder if one could teach wisdom to an extent, or at least train it. Maybe by putting people through a lot of experiences that highlight how little they really know and understand, how many vastly different nonergodic systems there are, and just how complex reality can be. The biggest trouble is evaluating how well the training is working, perhaps.
This sort of ‘practical wisdom’ is what military training aims to give new soldiers. Given a normal level of intelligence and humility, it works. But some recruits are too stupid to learn, and some are too egotistical.
Military experience is what I was thinking of as a base, yes. It seems to work pretty well for some, so I had thought that if one could generalize it into a sort of program for generalized wisdom in social affairs, business, military matters, whatever, that would be really valuable. Boiling it down to a six week summer camp for teens might be asking too much, but something. How to teach my girls not to be fools, basically, and then how to teach other people's kids. (And know you actually did it, not just claim you did it and give them a little certificate :D )
Farming is pretty much based on a kind of generalized wisdom, I think. And you 'learn' that wisdom without necessarily earning much of your own by spending a lot of time with a wise farmer. Probably a close relative. And wise farmers, in my experience, let the young 'earn' some wisdom the hard way. By making mistakes and having to fix them.
I think this was the original rationale in the Outward Bound program. But I have never read any studies on how successful it has been in accomplishing this.
Some are too intelligent as well, it's why they screen out high IQ along with independently wealthy. Einstein wouldn't have made a good laundry specialist for twenty years, nor Musk.
Only certain militaries do this.
Regarding wisdom and fools.... see comment below.
Yeah - as someone once posted, "it takes a lot of conscientiousness to spend the entire day screaming at people on Twitter dot com." Low conscientiousness does not describe "wokies" very well.
That's... actually a good question. Does it? I would think it would be low conscientiousness, because Twitter gives such instant feed back and the constant stream of new, so while people are doing the same general thing (screaming at people) they are getting rapid rewards and jumping from topic to topic very quickly. That would seem like low conscientious behavior, as opposed to say putting together a well researched response.
Then again, maybe the low conscientious move would just be to get mad, dislike the post, write "U R an idiot!" and then wander off?
I honestly don't know how conscientiousness applies here :D
Yea, I'd have to be much more of an expert on this personality framework to push back at this because I think both of our interpretations are plausible. I do think that it's dangerous to equate conscientiousness with organizational skills (as I think Arnold does in the OP).
Look at it this way: A certain number of natural grifters may exhibit high intelligence and high conscientiousness. Grifting is just another career. But what happens when one IDavid Austin Walsh) 'applies' himself to a particular grift that he can't control?
He can see the grift working for others, he just can't see that one of his own constituent components will be blocking him. After all, there's a lot of yelling about being white allies.
Note that Adam Grant’s central thesis in Give and Take is that what he calls “disagreeable givers” are essential hires in any organization. Same conclusion, from the MBA/management science perspective.
Where do self destructive libertarians who have little self control but believe root and branch in anarchocapitalism go in this model? I generally agree with the sentiment/the idea - people have feelings, then they search for belief systems and arguments that honor those feelings. Which is why academia is supposed to be so important - it's supposed to be a whole segment of society that can detach their feelings from their analysis of concepts and try to get at the truth.
For the past eight or so years I've been convinced that treating people's political interests as aspects of their personality rather than deeply thought through first principles that they hold is the only way to stay sane while talking about politics. Otherwise things get mutually incomprehensible pretty quickly.
"Woke & Smart?" I wish this word "smart" didn't get applied so liberally these days - to merely mean someone who might score high on an IQ test. When I was young, to be smart meant that you were nobody's fool. People who lack the wisdom and self-awareness to figure out how and why they have allowed themselves to be seduced by fashionable but patently absurd beliefs are not smart.....just foolish.
It's a strange coincidence that the people who feel its their responsibility to determine who is "smart" (in the professional world--psychologists, educators etc.) miraculously always assess themselves as being very "smart."
ISWYDT
Sure explains me.