Adam Mastroianni on personality psych; Teresa M. Bejan on the history of free speech; Richard Ngo on epistemology; Tove K on group selection and anti-natalism
As the MBTI org letter writes, the purpose is more to understand yourself and the people you deal with. For this, for normal healthy folk, it’s better than Big 5. Tho as woke increases mental illness, that might change.
Not mentioned is that only about 25% of people are N, iNtuitive (abstract), according to my memory of the “please understand me “ book I read 35+ years ago. Those are mostly the folk for whom college is good-tho there are lots of high IQ folk who are S.
Big 5 is like the box score of a basketball game, M-B tells you what position you play. Two players can have the same scoreline but play different positions. They can be compatible.
"We speak our minds not to change the minds of our opponents, but to tell our friends—and enemies—which side we’re on."
I'd agree that is almost entirely true of MSM and conservative media. For the rest of us, maybe that is true more often than not but I think we should recognize that it is far from always true. That said, we should also recognize that even the most gifted writers are mostly bad at writing with a perspective that has a chance at convincing people on the other side.
“ even the most gifted writers are mostly bad at writing with a perspective that has a chance at convincing people on the other side”
There is also the time lapse factor.
Rare indeed is the person who changes his mind on substantive topics, let alone on core political philosophy, in an instant. But many people change slowly over the course of years. I surely did from the early 1990s through 9/11.
Sorry Arnold, but these links aren’t pulling me in. I’d rather listen to this week’s Econtalk guest talk with Russ Roberts. Hope you don’t mind me saying that.
I liked Roberts' quote of Dickens which apparently isn't, "Only half of what you believe is true." better than the real one from Poe, "Believe nothing you hear and only half of what you see." My favorite was AK's response, "Trust those who seek the truth but doubt those who say they have found it." I found another version of that I like even better, "Walk with those seeking truth. Run from those who think they've found it”.
I’ll invoke Merle Kling’s First Iron Law: Sometimes it’s this way and sometimes it’s that way. If I make any stronger claims than that there’s a good chance we won’t agree. :). Thanks Stu.
"Metaphors" is the wrong concept, I think. How is Newtonian mechanics a metaphor of anything? The correct concept is models of reality. The stuff of thinking is models of varying degree of abstraction, from very low-level ones like "distinct object separate from other objects" which are more or less encoded in the brain structure of all quadrupeds at least, to Newtonian mechanics, and to mathematics which provides abstract models of certain classes of models. The realm of facts to which the familiar notion of contingent falsity applies, such as "George Washington was the first president of USA", is an intermediate level model which contains such entities as "George Washington" and "USA". Again it is hardly enlightening (i.e. it's not a productive model) to call this model a metaphor. A model by itself cannot be said to be true or false. Instead it can be or not be productive/useful for thinking and/or practical application, and it can be or not be internally consistent. If it is not internally consistent, it may still be serviceable in an area if nothing better is available, or parts of it may be salvaged by restricting its scope or extracting a self-consistent submodel. A model has areas of applicability (possibly empty until we discover them). It can be built on top of more low-level models, and then there is the question of whether the mapping between them is regular. Models can have nesting or intersecting areas of applicability, and then there is a question of whether they give similar enough results in the shared area. Etc.
“It seems to me that it has more to do with industrialization, the drop in infant mortality (which reduces the pressure to have many pregnancies), and urbanization.”
Industrialization = we are a lot wealthier now, sure.
But infant mortality drop and urbanization as more important than generous old age welfare states (children becoming consumer goods rather than producer goods) and the widespread availability of birth control (contraception plus abortion)? Really??
Infant mortality drop and urbanization were fairly widespread by the end of the 1950s, at least in the U.S. and the richest European nations, but TFR dropped a whole lot more after 1960 than before. At least for the U.S., the mega drop occurred between 1960 and 1975.
While not quite as extreme by percentage , those years show the largest drop for France and the U.K. as well, with the drop starting just a few years later.
Not really evidence for infant mortality and urbanization as main explanatory causes, seems to me.
A metaphor is true if its subject really has qualities the metaphor calls to mind.
Examples of metaphors that are true:
"The collapse of Communism in eastern Europe." The system of organized make-believe really did fall apart like an unsound edifice beset by uncompensated strains.
"An invisible hand." Given liberal institutions and norms, open markets really do tend towards patterns of sustainable specialization and trade.
An example of a metaphor that is false:
"The Prisoner's Dilemma." In this game, a player doesn't have a dilemma. Instead, she has a straightforward dominant strategy. (A dilemma is a situation in which a person faces a hard choice between equally undesirable alternatives.) A metaphor that is true of this game: "The Prisoner's Rationality Trap."
I look forward to your essay about metaphor and cultural analysis.
Not sure that the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe is a metaphor like the other examples. IMO it’s a lot closer to a fact - the reality that the timings weren’t identical notwithstanding.
Seems like a great response to claims of misinformation. And for a different reason, "Is Trump really like Hitler?" might also be pretty good. Or maybe, "Will climate change end the world by 2030?"
“As long as they don't get a clear signal from society, most of them will be very anxious that forming a family is in fact an antisocial decision that will rightfully lower their social position.”
That feels a lot like reasoning backwards from the observation that many people say “it would be bad for the planet” when asked why they don’t have kids. I highly doubt most people who don’t have kids are thinking that doing so would be antisocial, lowering their status in the same way drug use or criminality would. The particular neurosis described might apply to a few, but it seems to be a very few.
And as Arnold points out, the fertility drop is relatively recent, while the civilizational change had been happening for a long time. Was fertility higher when people referred to themselves as Pennsylvanians or New Yorkers first? It was.
“ That feels a lot like reasoning backwards from the observation that many people say “it would be bad for the planet” when asked why they don’t have kids. I highly doubt most people who don’t have kids are thinking that doing so would be antisocial, lowering their status in the same way drug use or criminality would.”
While I do indeed know a few older liberal females who feel that way re: the planet, I think Arnold was much more referring to the perceived status of stay-at-home mothers compared to women in the workforce. There was a massive shift in this point from 1960 to 1979, and continued incremental shifts in the same direction thereafter ever since, in aggregate.
That wasn't Arnold saying that, but Tove K. from Wood from Eden. She was very specific about the "antisocial" part, which means something different from "an alright choice, but lower status than another" and specifically "bad for society". Tove often is a bit sloppy in her writing I find, so maybe she meant something other than what she wrote.
I’m reminded of a little informal moms group I was once sorta part of. All of us were breastfeeding, of course. That was the zeitgeist at that particular moment. Cloth diapers too. A couple people had Boomer mothers who breastfed. I thought I might be the only one who had not been breastfed *at all*. But another of the moms, from a well-to-do landowning family in Northern Mexico, also had not. In fact, she said her mother was quite scandalized at her incessant breastfeeding, which was “como animales”.
I’m with Stu in seeing an unwillingness to embrace the messiness, the risks, and even to some extent, the physical. All that is downstream of feminism of course; but it’s taken on a life of its own.
The planet business is something they’ve heard, and repeated. It’s not the felt reason.
I agree that seeing it as antisocial is a small group. Bad for the planet is probably larger but not that large either. I think the bigger issue is it is seen as costly, both in time and money, whether not wanting to sacrifice that much or not feeling able. There is probably some truth in those views but I suspect the bigger influence is a shift toward a focus on the self.
Well, the Bejan and Tove K links seem to present an opportunity for me to get all solipsistic and self-referential so I might as well seize it. The great democrat and populist Cleisthenes was instrumental in transforming ancient Athens from hereditary kinship based governance structures into a more decentralized, citizenship based system, thereby laying the foundation for a golden age. Per Encyclopedia Britannica:
"Cleisthenes had seen that though the tyranny had improved the economic condition of the common people and had, temporarily at least, broken the political power of the noble houses, most of the old families were still looking to the past rather than the future, the full promise of the Solonian reforms could not be realized unless the principle of hereditary privilege was attacked at the roots. He therefore persuaded the people to change the basis of political organization from the family, clan, and phratry (kinship group) to the locality. Public rights and duties should henceforward depend on membership of a deme, or township, which kept its own register of citizens and elected its own officials. The citizen would no longer be known only by his father’s name but also or alone by the name of his deme. Ten new local tribes were formed to take the place of the four Ionic blood tribes, and, to make faction building more difficult, Attica was divided into three areas—the city itself and its suburbs, the coastal area, and the inland area; and townships from each of the three areas were included in each tribe, 10 counties, trittyes, being formed in each area for this purpose. Within that grouping steps were probably taken to diminish the local influence of some of the main priestly families. The mixed local tribe became the basis of representation in public office, and the Solonian Council of Four Hundred was increased to 500 (50 from each tribe, with members selected from demes according to their numbers; see Council of Five Hundred). Isonomia, the principle of equality of rights for all, was one of the proudest boasts of the reformers, and there is no doubt that Cleisthenes’ work led to a much wider and more active participation by all persons in public life."
With respect to free speech, under this new scheme, every male citizen registered with his deme had an equal right be selected by sortition to serve in the Council of 500 and to to speak before the council for all members, regardless of social status or family background. Free speech and democracy have thus been linked through the ages and it is not surprising that through history as hatred and suppression of democracy has waxed, free speech and the prosperity that comes with it have waned.
Well, at least one group we don’t have to persuade or yell at is the Quakers, given that you aren’t likely to meet one in a month of Sundays (which I guess is just an actual month, to a Quaker). It wasn’t as universally appealing as they hoped, judging from their fortunes.
I’m glad every day is holy to a Quaker, otherwise I’d be worried they were wholly defunct; the Quaker meeting house in my city has a few cars in the parking lot about once a year. And the building is not otherwise used as a community space or for sort of events for happy causes, dear to liberals.
Freedom of speech is pretty clearly not a universal value. It may have been a specific American value, owing to quirks of the Founders; but America will only be growing more universal, and less specific.
The UUA nationally and my local UU church (new minister) has gone to an unbelievably extreme progressive left. I no longer participate. I've procrastinated trying a god-based church without thinking to at least try our local quaker church. They have a nice space and seem at least somewhat active. I'm not sure what to expect but it seems worth exploring. Thanks.
I'm from a time of the proud Unitarian joke, "A Unitarian dies and wakes ups in the lobby of an unfamiliar building. There are three signs, "To Heaven", "To Hell", and "To Discussion". He heads to the discussion."
That is not the Unitarian Universalist Association today. It seems to have adopted the New York Times marketing strategy. People who can see various sides to issues don't bestir themselves Sunday mornings. But those who "are full of passionate intensity" might.
It is very unclear to me there is such a thing as good universal results for personality disorders and mental illnesses on any of the big personality tests that are for and utilized by the general public. An issue in psychology that I have noticed attempting to read widely within psychology is there are a fairly significant number of domain silos that are saying true and contradictory things and there does seem to be some smart people looking at these sorts of things at times. For example, in personality psychology Razib Khan interviewed that guy from Illinois who is a personality psychologist with an H index over 100. He said, "the correlation between your temperament when you're an infant, and a toddler is almost zero with what you're like as an adult." Now this is a somewhat out of context quote and if you go back and read this section of the interview it is quite a bit more nuanced, but this might come as some news to people who like Joyce Benenson's book, which I have not read, but seems to have a lot to say about temperament. This domain siloing seems to have some explanatory power as to why Benenson's work can be ignored as well. And, to go against Paul Bloom's advice there is a paper out there that claims that temperament can contribute to personality at a level anywhere from 2 to 12 percent. I tentatively have to conclude there are people who have extreme temperaments that can be having an outsized effect(s) on their personality and this doesn't seem to be picked up very well in personality scales and categorization that are aimed at universality. It also makes me wonder a lot about the GWAS attempts on personality, and even if it gets a lot better how they will end up in a similar position as the GWAS on schizophrenia. Maybe they will get good crude percentages on the Tyler Cowen neurological diversity club and we will see how much the tails are informing the whole.
Upon reading Mastroianni's "Is Psychology Going to Cincinnati?", I'd like to know your view on Acemoglu&Co getting the Nobel Prize. You may know that the JEL will publish Acemoglu & Robinson's latest paper "Culture, Institutions and Social Equilibria: A Framework" (updated version NBER WP 28832) in which they develop a framework which they claim "it enriches the codetermination of political, institutional, and cultural outcomes" , outcomes which are decisive to explain wealth, in particular, differences in wealth across "societies". The new paper goes well beyond whatever they have written about institutions and I doubt they are going to Cincinnati.
Nice defense of Myers Briggs, plus a link to even better
https://dynomight.net/in-defense-of-myers-briggs.html
As the MBTI org letter writes, the purpose is more to understand yourself and the people you deal with. For this, for normal healthy folk, it’s better than Big 5. Tho as woke increases mental illness, that might change.
Not mentioned is that only about 25% of people are N, iNtuitive (abstract), according to my memory of the “please understand me “ book I read 35+ years ago. Those are mostly the folk for whom college is good-tho there are lots of high IQ folk who are S.
IQ is likely best single # for life outcomes.
Big 5 is like the box score of a basketball game, M-B tells you what position you play. Two players can have the same scoreline but play different positions. They can be compatible.
"We speak our minds not to change the minds of our opponents, but to tell our friends—and enemies—which side we’re on."
I'd agree that is almost entirely true of MSM and conservative media. For the rest of us, maybe that is true more often than not but I think we should recognize that it is far from always true. That said, we should also recognize that even the most gifted writers are mostly bad at writing with a perspective that has a chance at convincing people on the other side.
“ even the most gifted writers are mostly bad at writing with a perspective that has a chance at convincing people on the other side”
There is also the time lapse factor.
Rare indeed is the person who changes his mind on substantive topics, let alone on core political philosophy, in an instant. But many people change slowly over the course of years. I surely did from the early 1990s through 9/11.
Sorry Arnold, but these links aren’t pulling me in. I’d rather listen to this week’s Econtalk guest talk with Russ Roberts. Hope you don’t mind me saying that.
https://www.econtalk.org/misinformation-and-the-three-languages-of-politics-with-arnold-kling/
I liked Roberts' quote of Dickens which apparently isn't, "Only half of what you believe is true." better than the real one from Poe, "Believe nothing you hear and only half of what you see." My favorite was AK's response, "Trust those who seek the truth but doubt those who say they have found it." I found another version of that I like even better, "Walk with those seeking truth. Run from those who think they've found it”.
I’ll invoke Merle Kling’s First Iron Law: Sometimes it’s this way and sometimes it’s that way. If I make any stronger claims than that there’s a good chance we won’t agree. :). Thanks Stu.
Lakoff & Johnson’s *Metaphors We Live By* (1980) is a classic reference in these matters.
If Jean-Paul Sartre Was Black He'd Be Ta Nehisi Coates https://torrancestephensphd.substack.com/p/if-jean-paul-sartre-was-black-hed
"Metaphors" is the wrong concept, I think. How is Newtonian mechanics a metaphor of anything? The correct concept is models of reality. The stuff of thinking is models of varying degree of abstraction, from very low-level ones like "distinct object separate from other objects" which are more or less encoded in the brain structure of all quadrupeds at least, to Newtonian mechanics, and to mathematics which provides abstract models of certain classes of models. The realm of facts to which the familiar notion of contingent falsity applies, such as "George Washington was the first president of USA", is an intermediate level model which contains such entities as "George Washington" and "USA". Again it is hardly enlightening (i.e. it's not a productive model) to call this model a metaphor. A model by itself cannot be said to be true or false. Instead it can be or not be productive/useful for thinking and/or practical application, and it can be or not be internally consistent. If it is not internally consistent, it may still be serviceable in an area if nothing better is available, or parts of it may be salvaged by restricting its scope or extracting a self-consistent submodel. A model has areas of applicability (possibly empty until we discover them). It can be built on top of more low-level models, and then there is the question of whether the mapping between them is regular. Models can have nesting or intersecting areas of applicability, and then there is a question of whether they give similar enough results in the shared area. Etc.
“It seems to me that it has more to do with industrialization, the drop in infant mortality (which reduces the pressure to have many pregnancies), and urbanization.”
Industrialization = we are a lot wealthier now, sure.
But infant mortality drop and urbanization as more important than generous old age welfare states (children becoming consumer goods rather than producer goods) and the widespread availability of birth control (contraception plus abortion)? Really??
Infant mortality drop and urbanization were fairly widespread by the end of the 1950s, at least in the U.S. and the richest European nations, but TFR dropped a whole lot more after 1960 than before. At least for the U.S., the mega drop occurred between 1960 and 1975.
While not quite as extreme by percentage , those years show the largest drop for France and the U.K. as well, with the drop starting just a few years later.
Not really evidence for infant mortality and urbanization as main explanatory causes, seems to me.
Re: "A metaphor is neither true nor false."
A metaphor is true if its subject really has qualities the metaphor calls to mind.
Examples of metaphors that are true:
"The collapse of Communism in eastern Europe." The system of organized make-believe really did fall apart like an unsound edifice beset by uncompensated strains.
"An invisible hand." Given liberal institutions and norms, open markets really do tend towards patterns of sustainable specialization and trade.
An example of a metaphor that is false:
"The Prisoner's Dilemma." In this game, a player doesn't have a dilemma. Instead, she has a straightforward dominant strategy. (A dilemma is a situation in which a person faces a hard choice between equally undesirable alternatives.) A metaphor that is true of this game: "The Prisoner's Rationality Trap."
I look forward to your essay about metaphor and cultural analysis.
Not sure that the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe is a metaphor like the other examples. IMO it’s a lot closer to a fact - the reality that the timings weren’t identical notwithstanding.
I do mostly agree with you on the rest.
The Party That Cannot Tell You What A Woman is, Mad Men Will Not Vote For Them. https://torrancestephensphd.substack.com/p/the-party-that-cannot-tell-you-what
Is Newtonian physics true or false?
Seems like a great response to claims of misinformation. And for a different reason, "Is Trump really like Hitler?" might also be pretty good. Or maybe, "Will climate change end the world by 2030?"
“As long as they don't get a clear signal from society, most of them will be very anxious that forming a family is in fact an antisocial decision that will rightfully lower their social position.”
That feels a lot like reasoning backwards from the observation that many people say “it would be bad for the planet” when asked why they don’t have kids. I highly doubt most people who don’t have kids are thinking that doing so would be antisocial, lowering their status in the same way drug use or criminality would. The particular neurosis described might apply to a few, but it seems to be a very few.
And as Arnold points out, the fertility drop is relatively recent, while the civilizational change had been happening for a long time. Was fertility higher when people referred to themselves as Pennsylvanians or New Yorkers first? It was.
“ That feels a lot like reasoning backwards from the observation that many people say “it would be bad for the planet” when asked why they don’t have kids. I highly doubt most people who don’t have kids are thinking that doing so would be antisocial, lowering their status in the same way drug use or criminality would.”
While I do indeed know a few older liberal females who feel that way re: the planet, I think Arnold was much more referring to the perceived status of stay-at-home mothers compared to women in the workforce. There was a massive shift in this point from 1960 to 1979, and continued incremental shifts in the same direction thereafter ever since, in aggregate.
That wasn't Arnold saying that, but Tove K. from Wood from Eden. She was very specific about the "antisocial" part, which means something different from "an alright choice, but lower status than another" and specifically "bad for society". Tove often is a bit sloppy in her writing I find, so maybe she meant something other than what she wrote.
I’m reminded of a little informal moms group I was once sorta part of. All of us were breastfeeding, of course. That was the zeitgeist at that particular moment. Cloth diapers too. A couple people had Boomer mothers who breastfed. I thought I might be the only one who had not been breastfed *at all*. But another of the moms, from a well-to-do landowning family in Northern Mexico, also had not. In fact, she said her mother was quite scandalized at her incessant breastfeeding, which was “como animales”.
I’m with Stu in seeing an unwillingness to embrace the messiness, the risks, and even to some extent, the physical. All that is downstream of feminism of course; but it’s taken on a life of its own.
The planet business is something they’ve heard, and repeated. It’s not the felt reason.
I agree that seeing it as antisocial is a small group. Bad for the planet is probably larger but not that large either. I think the bigger issue is it is seen as costly, both in time and money, whether not wanting to sacrifice that much or not feeling able. There is probably some truth in those views but I suspect the bigger influence is a shift toward a focus on the self.
Well, the Bejan and Tove K links seem to present an opportunity for me to get all solipsistic and self-referential so I might as well seize it. The great democrat and populist Cleisthenes was instrumental in transforming ancient Athens from hereditary kinship based governance structures into a more decentralized, citizenship based system, thereby laying the foundation for a golden age. Per Encyclopedia Britannica:
"Cleisthenes had seen that though the tyranny had improved the economic condition of the common people and had, temporarily at least, broken the political power of the noble houses, most of the old families were still looking to the past rather than the future, the full promise of the Solonian reforms could not be realized unless the principle of hereditary privilege was attacked at the roots. He therefore persuaded the people to change the basis of political organization from the family, clan, and phratry (kinship group) to the locality. Public rights and duties should henceforward depend on membership of a deme, or township, which kept its own register of citizens and elected its own officials. The citizen would no longer be known only by his father’s name but also or alone by the name of his deme. Ten new local tribes were formed to take the place of the four Ionic blood tribes, and, to make faction building more difficult, Attica was divided into three areas—the city itself and its suburbs, the coastal area, and the inland area; and townships from each of the three areas were included in each tribe, 10 counties, trittyes, being formed in each area for this purpose. Within that grouping steps were probably taken to diminish the local influence of some of the main priestly families. The mixed local tribe became the basis of representation in public office, and the Solonian Council of Four Hundred was increased to 500 (50 from each tribe, with members selected from demes according to their numbers; see Council of Five Hundred). Isonomia, the principle of equality of rights for all, was one of the proudest boasts of the reformers, and there is no doubt that Cleisthenes’ work led to a much wider and more active participation by all persons in public life."
(https://www.britannica.com/biography/Cleisthenes-of-Athens )
With respect to free speech, under this new scheme, every male citizen registered with his deme had an equal right be selected by sortition to serve in the Council of 500 and to to speak before the council for all members, regardless of social status or family background. Free speech and democracy have thus been linked through the ages and it is not surprising that through history as hatred and suppression of democracy has waxed, free speech and the prosperity that comes with it have waned.
Well, at least one group we don’t have to persuade or yell at is the Quakers, given that you aren’t likely to meet one in a month of Sundays (which I guess is just an actual month, to a Quaker). It wasn’t as universally appealing as they hoped, judging from their fortunes.
I’m glad every day is holy to a Quaker, otherwise I’d be worried they were wholly defunct; the Quaker meeting house in my city has a few cars in the parking lot about once a year. And the building is not otherwise used as a community space or for sort of events for happy causes, dear to liberals.
Freedom of speech is pretty clearly not a universal value. It may have been a specific American value, owing to quirks of the Founders; but America will only be growing more universal, and less specific.
The UUA nationally and my local UU church (new minister) has gone to an unbelievably extreme progressive left. I no longer participate. I've procrastinated trying a god-based church without thinking to at least try our local quaker church. They have a nice space and seem at least somewhat active. I'm not sure what to expect but it seems worth exploring. Thanks.
I'm from a time of the proud Unitarian joke, "A Unitarian dies and wakes ups in the lobby of an unfamiliar building. There are three signs, "To Heaven", "To Hell", and "To Discussion". He heads to the discussion."
That is not the Unitarian Universalist Association today. It seems to have adopted the New York Times marketing strategy. People who can see various sides to issues don't bestir themselves Sunday mornings. But those who "are full of passionate intensity" might.
Most of that sounds accurate. The rest probably is too but I'm less certain.
I thought when I first noticed it in the neighborhood , that I’d “attend the occasional Quaker meeting”
as I heard someone airily say once, of their religious practice, but there has never been an opening for me to do so.
But this town has a ton of churches, and none appear to be packed at any time during the week.
It is very unclear to me there is such a thing as good universal results for personality disorders and mental illnesses on any of the big personality tests that are for and utilized by the general public. An issue in psychology that I have noticed attempting to read widely within psychology is there are a fairly significant number of domain silos that are saying true and contradictory things and there does seem to be some smart people looking at these sorts of things at times. For example, in personality psychology Razib Khan interviewed that guy from Illinois who is a personality psychologist with an H index over 100. He said, "the correlation between your temperament when you're an infant, and a toddler is almost zero with what you're like as an adult." Now this is a somewhat out of context quote and if you go back and read this section of the interview it is quite a bit more nuanced, but this might come as some news to people who like Joyce Benenson's book, which I have not read, but seems to have a lot to say about temperament. This domain siloing seems to have some explanatory power as to why Benenson's work can be ignored as well. And, to go against Paul Bloom's advice there is a paper out there that claims that temperament can contribute to personality at a level anywhere from 2 to 12 percent. I tentatively have to conclude there are people who have extreme temperaments that can be having an outsized effect(s) on their personality and this doesn't seem to be picked up very well in personality scales and categorization that are aimed at universality. It also makes me wonder a lot about the GWAS attempts on personality, and even if it gets a lot better how they will end up in a similar position as the GWAS on schizophrenia. Maybe they will get good crude percentages on the Tyler Cowen neurological diversity club and we will see how much the tails are informing the whole.
Upon reading Mastroianni's "Is Psychology Going to Cincinnati?", I'd like to know your view on Acemoglu&Co getting the Nobel Prize. You may know that the JEL will publish Acemoglu & Robinson's latest paper "Culture, Institutions and Social Equilibria: A Framework" (updated version NBER WP 28832) in which they develop a framework which they claim "it enriches the codetermination of political, institutional, and cultural outcomes" , outcomes which are decisive to explain wealth, in particular, differences in wealth across "societies". The new paper goes well beyond whatever they have written about institutions and I doubt they are going to Cincinnati.