Links to Consider, 10/15/2024

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

Adam Mastroianni writes,

A group called ClearerThinking tested exactly that by comparing the Big Five to the Meyers-Briggs Personality Indicator³ and the Enneagram, two personality assessments that were created outside of academic psychology…. The ClearerThinking folks checked how well each test predicted things about participants’ lives, like whether they’re married, own a home, have been convicted of a crime, meditate daily, and have a lot of friends.

…After millions of dollars and thousands of studies, we are not obviously better at predicting life outcomes than people who… didn’t do any of that. 

Teresa M. Bejan writes,

As formulated by the movement’s founder, George Fox, this Quaker commitment to free speech was both principled and parrhesiastic: “Let them speak their minds,” he wrote in 1661, “And let him be Jew, or Papist, or Turk, or Heathen, or Protestant, or what soever, or such as worship sun or moon or sticks and stones, let them have liberty where every one may bring forth his strength, and have free liberty to speak forth his mind and judgment.”

Reminds me of my recent post in praise of Quaker liberalism.

Bejan also writes,

Cynics like Diogenes and Quakers like Mary Fisher spoke their minds because they wanted to convince other people to change their own. But what passes for “free speech” today strikes me as singularly unconcerned with persuading anyone. 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 noticed this a little over ten years ago, and that is when I wrote The Three Languages of Politics.

Richard Ngo writes,

I have two objections to the idea that idealized reasoning should be understood in terms of propositions that are true or false:

1. We should assign truth-values that are intermediate between true and false (fuzzy truth-values)

2. We should reason in terms of models rather than propositions (the semantic view)

My takeaway from Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought is that all of our thinking consists of metaphors. Thinking is metaphors all the way down.

A metaphor is neither true nor false. It is more or less appropriate, depending on context. Think of Newtonian mechanics.

I try to understand human behavior in terms of human nature, culture, institutions, technology, and history. These are all fuzzy concepts. Their interaction is complex.

Ngo’s post is entitled “Why I am not a Bayesian.” the TL;DR is that the Bayesian metaphor is more or less appropriate, depending on context.

I will write a longer post in a week or so about the notion that metaphors are difficult to evaluate. Think of metaphors such as “Trump is like Hitler,” “inflation is too much money chasing too few goods,” or “the economy is like a factory that cuts back production when there is not enough demand.”

Tove K writes,

The most successful societies of today became successful because their citizens found it even more important to be citizens than to be family members. Societies where people were most of all loyal with their families couldn't withstand the armies of societies that could cooperate efficiently above the family level. 

The price for this development is that the instinct to form families for the sake of it has been weakened. If people don't get to hear that having numerous children makes you a good citizen, most of them will not want to do that. 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.

In a kinship-based society, you want to have more kin. As we evolved toward larger groups with membership not limited to kin, some of the motivation for having more children went away. But it seems to me that large-scale societies are about 10,000 years old, and the decline in fertility is relatively recent. 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. All of this leading to a reversal of status for childbearing women relative to non-childbearing women.

substacks referenced above: @

Human procreation is fuelled by the spirit of war

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Why I'm not a Bayesian

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A People’s History of Free Speech

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Is psychology going to Cincinnati?