"This is in contrast with other personality tests, such as Myers-Briggs, where different test instruments can produce different results for the same person, and where someone’s assessed personality characteristics can vary from year to year."
Between 11:00 and 14:00 minutes of Razib Khan's most recent podcast psychologist Brent Roberts explains the issues with the Myers Briggs test. He also talks at times about the continuity of personality over years and decades with general percentages.
I have no dog in the hunt, but for what it's worth, I've taken MBTI-type tests and 5-factor-type tests numerous times each. The MBTI results are pretty consistent - there's variation, but if you look at the scores as continuous rather than binary on each dimension (which is obviously a marketing-oriented simplification), they come out in very similar places (in my case, on the borderline on one of those binary dimensions). This has not been at all true of the 5-factor-type tests, where my scores have come out all over the place.
While I realize this is a data point of one person, and maybe it's because I'm using "popular" versions of the tests, but it's been so striking that I can't help wondering if the claims about the unreliability of MBTI are actually a driven by something other than actual scientific testing.
Roberts makes the claim that MBTI simply tests four of the big five factors. He doesn't provide his mapping (at least, not on the videos I've seen), and peer-reviewed studies reportedly don't find such a mapping - at least, not in any one-to-one way. He goes on to say that the MBTI "removes the negative factors" like neuroticism and emotional (in)stability, and "took out the negative aspects of extroversion and conscientiousness and agreeableness and openness" to make it more marketable. I'm actually confused by Roberts' claims - maybe he meant "took out the positive aspects of" those things, or perhaps "took out the negative aspects" of not having those things. In any case, (non-pathological) neuroticism and emotional dynamic range, and introversion and disagreeableness and conservatism and even flightiness must have positive evolutionary value or they wouldn't exist. Indeed, one of the flaws of the 5-factor model is the value judgments implicit in its nomenclature: who wants to be labeled "neurotic" or "disagreeable"? - and yet, for example, psychologists make a good portion of their income helping people to become exactly those things so they can be more aware of their emotional state and more effective in their lives. The Big 5 steers the assessment toward a preference for specific outcomes - as Roberts acknowledges. Those preferences would look very different if "neurotic" were labeled "emotionally responsive", if "agreeable" were labeled "unassertive" and so on - which labels would be equally accurate. There's a lot to be said for the MBTI's non-judgmental approach to personality profiling.
"He doesn't provide his mapping (at least, not on the videos I've seen), and peer-reviewed studies reportedly don't find such a mapping - at least, not in any one-to-one way."
The big 5 was empirically derived from the data using factor analysis. They didn't just pick 5 trait scales, it could just have easily been the big 7 or 8 or 10 if it came out that way. So when you take the MBTI and just get rid of the neuroticism trait scale it doesn't just go away, people don't stop having a measurable level of anxiety or neuroticism, it has to be distributed somewhere in the other categories of the MBTI. At least this is probably why you can't get a one to one between the two tests between the four factors of the big 5 because there is all this unaccounted for variance shoved in to the four dichotomous measures of the MBTI.
I originally thought Roberts was being more clear than he is with his description of the statistics. He is being more charitable than most within his profession with regard to the MBTI though. He is acknowledging that the MBTI does have validity with regard to personality and it can't just be dismissed without dismissing the big 5 itself with regard to personality because of the overlap. There are different types of validity however and the development and history of the big 5 isn't just its validity with personality itself. It is a tool that has validity with regard to how well one will thrive within certain types of professions. The MBTI doesn't have validity in this regard.
Yes there is a very explicit bias against MBTI within psych grad schools. It is worth noting that the big 5 is something for Social Psychologists doing research. It isn't actually used by people doing clinical practice. They use the MMPI and/or the PAI.
What about the Flynn Effect? IQ rose by as much as 14 points over just a few generations. I don’t see how that could possibly be genetic. Maybe that involves education, or maybe not, but certainly demonstrates the possibility of big environmental / cultural effects.
Genetics gives an upper bound, based on pre-natal (in womb) development plus SES nutrition, care, & nurture. Sub-optimal nurture reduces the IQ relative to optimal nurture. It clearly “could possibly” be that the Flynn effect has merely reduced the sub-optimal SES edu reductions, allowing Americans to achieve their maximum genetic-nurture IQs. I suspect this is even true. Insofar as a lot IQ questions are somewhat abstract, learning how to do abstract IQ style questions is a skill that can be improved with practice, just as coaching improves SAT test taking skill.
Normal good people don’t like the idea that lower average Black IQs are significantly genetic.
We need a society that explicitly accepts the truth—half of the people will be below avg in IQ. (Median) We need policies, and laws, and norms of behavior so as to help guide them into making responsible decisions, and in jobs, so they can live comfy, middle class American lives. Without college, nor too much abstract thinking required.
There is a tendency to focus on genetics, but if genetics gives the upper bound, which I don’t doubt, let’s not forget that there remains a very significant role for culture and environment in IQ.
he's obviously lying. seriously, the inability of the intelligentsia / academia / commentariat to honestly talk about OBVIOUS population group differences in iq and other traits (violence/homicides) is just astounding and cowardly and oh so tiresome. He honestly wants us to pretend to believe that he thinks there's no difference on avg genetically in iq between an Ashkenazi Jew and an aboriginal australian?
come on. He's lying. We know he's lying. He knows we know he's lying. but we all continue this farce. It has to stop.
In the second part of the book (specifically Chapter 10, Triggering a Creative Explosion, pp. 324-5), he pretty much invites us to give a "Straussian" reading to chapter 3:
"If we can't trust that scientists are speaking freely then how can we trust science? Take, for example, group differences and the role of genes that we discussed in Chapter 3. Based on my reading of the evidence, I came down on the side of culture being the primary cause of these differences, but you should only believe me if those who believe otherwise are equally able to express the most defensible version of their position. If the only voice that could be heard in polite circles was mine then how could you know that there was an alternative argument and hear the evidence for it?"
We all know that arguing for the existence of racial differences in intelligence (or time preference or executive function or marshmallow eating or ...) is academic, and in polite circles social, suicide.
IMHO you can't talk about IQ without embracing (in some way) "The Bell Curve", (which is a long and somewhat tedious read. ) But the genetic component of IQ is obvious to all parents, well maybe just the smart parents. And to be on the left is to hate the bell curve. It's a tribal thing.
I suspect for psychiatrists, looking to ameliorate some mental illness, the Big 5 is more useful to help people heal. (Tho Rob Henderson notes each has 2 aspects, so it's more like 10)
For normal folk, non psych researchers, the MBTI 4 factor model has more immediate use. The 16 types, among 4 main temperaments, especially allows more communication understanding.
NT - NF - SJ - SP [These are far more specific than horoscopes, and more understandable]
The 4 axes (Introvert-Extrovert doesn't determine any of the 4 temperaments):
(to get the official names right; below is my memory from years ago)
Each of the 4 temperaments is different AND recognizable.
The names of the axis are admittedly not so good - so I've changed them in my mind.
I'd bet all of the commenters here are iNtuitive - N ("abstract") rather than Sensing - (concrete, specific), and probably most are of the NT (abstract Thinkers) rather than NF (abstract Feelers), where making decisions based on Feelings or Thinking is an important, useful difference.
Rather than Judging-Perceiving, I'd prefer Closure-Open, clean desk vs messy desk. Finishing projects rather than having many balls in the air. For the concrete (Sensing, not so abstract) folk, the J-P difference is more important.
This 16 personality model lists the possibilities. Yeah, folk on the border can be either. So for me, I'm an xNTP, sometimes Introvert, sometimes Extrovert. (So Logician or Debater; my guess for Arnold is that he's an INTJ Architect, with plans for everything)
It works. Because it's understandable, and memorable, and usable. In day to day life, especially with co-workers. Also, few folk always fit in any box - but having 4 big boxes which are different but recognizable, is quite valuable.
It's so clear and easy, everybody can understand it and relate to it -- and NOT need to pay a psychiatrist just to "understand" others.
I challenge any who like the Big 5 more to set up categories of people and how to understand them differently based on the category.
Given Arnold's excellent "Three Languages of Politics", which is another simplification, I'm a bit surprised he doesn't like the useful MBTI. Less surprised by money-seeking professionals against a simpler simple that is good enough for 80% of the people, 90% of the time.
Tho the current craze of demonization of oppressors and adulation for victims seems more like mass hysteria, that none of the personality models explain.
"Innate includes genetic inheritance but also development of the brain in the womb."
I don't know if any studies get past the possibility of unrelated correlation but I'm reasonably certain poor nutrition, stress, and/or isolation (limited stimulation) during the first five years or so, with worse consequences at younger ages, will stunt intelligence. If so, we for sure don't know the limits of intelligence gain by optimizing those factors.
Given that, I'd bet that early education could have some impact on intelligence.
<i>Our intuitive idea of someone’s race may not align with a scientific analysis of that person’s genetic ancestry.</i>
We often read this assertion, but how true is it? I haven't seen any studies, but it seems to me that Americans will determine the racial status of anyone they meet within a few seconds as part of the overall scan of status markers. Race is the single most salient factor in American social life. Edge cases notwithstanding, I'll bet our intuitive guesses more often than not line up with the genetic markers.
I've often heard, not always by clearly biased liberals trying to refute "race," that the genetic differences among Africans of different regions are far greater than between Africans and Europeans.
It would be great if someone could provide a confirming or contradicting source.
Since humans began in Africa and the rest of the world pretty much descends from a few populations that left Africa, it is almost inevitable that there is more genetic diversity within Africa than between Africans and non-Africans. Really, the only way this would not be true is if only one or a few African populations survived after the Out of Africa event(s).
But what is the significance of that? If you are arguing that the average intelligence of (sub-Saharan) Africans is the same as non-Africans, you are talking about mean and not variance.
Some of the African populations are very old and diverge quite a bit, which makes for a big variation. But these populations, until recently hunter-gatherers, are now fairly small, since they were forced out of desirable areas by iron-using farmers. Most of those farmers are broadly Bantus, originating around Cameroon, who pretty much swept over Africa starting about 4,000 years ago. They do not have a lot of variation.
I only meant that if what I've oft heard is true then "race" does not tell us much about intelligence. And I recognize that doesn't negate what Faze said though I have a different concern about his statement as I state below. What you say may also be true but I don't see that it changes my basic statement.
As I reread Faze's post, I acknowledge I have no idea how much race impacts intelligence. I'd be very surprised if it were zero but I'm very confident that social-cultural factors, such as discussed by you in a different comment, have far more influence on outcome than intelligence difference between races.
I'm not sure how the following is related to our discussion but do you think there is a benefit in assessing intelligence based on eye color?
"I only meant that if what I've oft heard is true then "race" does not tell us much about intelligence."
That's an empirical question. I like the following analogy:
Define two groups of people, people who live in the USA ("Americans") and people who live in Afghanistan ("Afghans"). These groups "have no biological reality". There is nothing that one has that the other doesn't. Some Americans even have ancestors all of whom lived in Afghanistan.
But what if I randomly chose one person from each group and asked you to bet, "Which one is Muslim?" You would win that bet more times than not if you said the Afghan. What if I continued to do that and you continued to answer Afghan? You'd win a lot of money. What if I changed the bet, "Which one has a higher income?" Now you answer, "The American" and you continue to win more often than you lose. Something that has no biological reality gives you important information.
Some people assert that assigning people to three "races" (Negroid, Caucasian, Oriental; black, white, yellow) or three "populations" (Sub-Saharan African, West Eurasian, East Eurasian) can also give you information on the likelihood of various characteristics--EVEN THOUGH THE CATEGORIES HAVE NO BIOLOGICAL REALITY.
The question is an empirical one. Alas, no one who values their reputation wants to seriously investigate it.
Having just listened to the Razib Khan/Brent Roberts conversation, it occurs to me that both The Big Five Personality Traits and the Meyers-Briggs categories are constructs, "social constructs", that have no biological reality. However, many people think that they can often make correct predictions and provide people with insight into themselves. Roberts even casually refers to them as constructs.
The first time I took Meyers-Briggs I thought I got something out of it. Maybe so, maybe not. But I took it other times, sometimes getting much different results, and have become less sure of the benefit. Maybe it's there, maybe not. Either way, it's still very different from IQ tests in EXACTLY the ways Kling mentions.
You have to realize that "race" is not some neat category defined by some definite characteristic. It is not "blue eyes". It's a fuzzy category that is little more than a very big extended family. So, to use American color coding, "blacks" are people most of whose ancestry comes from sub-saharan africa. "Whites" have most of their ancestry from west Eurasia. "Yellows" have most of their ancestry from east Eurasia. These populations were fairly isolated for the last 60,000 years and differences accumulated. Differences in appearance are enough for Americans to categorize pictures into 3 "racial" bins that have a greater than 90% agreement with genomic categorizing into SSA, WEU, and EEU.
That said, it is logically possible for average intelligence to differ in the three bins. There is not some special gene that the people in one bin have that the others don't. There are at least a thousand genes that affect intelligence. One person may have a lot of the variants that are associated with high intelligence. Another person may have few. Everyone will have some. One population may have a greater proportion of people with a lot.
I was trying to say that which "racial" bin a person falls in cannot automatically tell us how intelligent the person is. However, it could tell us "how to bet". It's the same way knowing whether someone is XX or XY doesn't tell us how tall the person is, but it does tell us that you are more likely to win a bet saying the XY person is taller.
I have heard that as well, though I can't recall from where exactly, from multiple sources. I think Sowell does allude to it in his Race and Culture book, although that focuses a lot more on the different regional peoples of Africa's culture than race per se. Although, it is worth noting that "genetic differences" covers a super broad range of things, from intelligence to height to where your body stores fat and a thousand other things. Just worth bearing in mind, as people often talk from "there are big differences (over a wide range of aspects)" to "the big differences are only in the aspect I care about." I've been seeing that a lot lately.
While cautioning that I suspect we don't know *quite* as much about genes as we think we do, here is Razib Khan explaining (I think) that the difference lies in whether a population has been subject to an extreme bottleneck or not?:
"The genes must be crazy: genetically very-diverse humans
The very-diverse are hunter-gatherer populations who live in clusters scattered across Central and Southern Africa, in Namibia, Botswana, the Congo and a dozen other nations. They include the Khoi, the San, the Mbuti, the Mbenga, the Twa and the Hadza. Inside their DNA, they carry such a dazzling diversity of single-nucleotide-polymorphisms (SNPS), that even two San from different groups both living in Namibia’s Northern Kalahari desert, and speaking click languages from the same family, are more genetically distinct from one another, by a solid 20%, than a person from Stockholm is from a person from Shanghai. That is, they average a rate of 1.2 nucleotide differences per kilobase (1000 SNPs), where a Northern European and Chinese person differ from each other at a rate of only one difference per kilobase. And the San in this example were both from the Kalahari; imagine comparing samples from peoples who live thousands of miles apart!
"The DNA results are in. You are.... NOT genetically diverse (all 7.7 billion of you)
Why are the vast majority of us not-very-diverse and very-not-diverse? And which is which? Genetically, all the rest of modern humanity is one of two similar flavors (or a swirl of the two) with lessened genetic diversity, because along the path to today, we lost most of our diversity. How? Severe population contraction. Inbreeding, if you must. As far as we can tell, all of humanity, at some point in the past 60,000-120,000 years was forced through one or more funnels. And most of our glorious diversity of potential ancestors didn’t survive the successive culls.
"In the case of the very-not-diverse (fully 6.42 billion-ish of us), our models suggest that life on earth threw a funnel across their path, and only 1,000-10,000 lucky humans made it through the impossibly narrow neck. Our best (always provisional) models suggest they dwindled from an earlier population maybe 10 times bigger. So this round of cuts diminished the breeding pool by 90%. ...
"Those 1,000-10,000 human beings who made it through their ordeal, smuggled out in their nuclei all the genetic diversity 6.42 billion very-not-diverse humans among us today would have to draw on ever after. Take a native each from say Santa Fe, Stockholm, Shanghai, Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia, Uluru in the Australian outback and a Sentinelese person from the Andaman Islands and you behold a little of the amazing superficial variety of the human race. They and their relatives have peopled almost every corner of the earth. They speak a riot of different languages and they look nothing like one another. And yet, aside from a dash of Denisovan here and a trace of Neanderthal there, as far as we can tell, they all trace the entirety of their ancestry back to a single founder event about 60,000 years ago. An event when just a tiny subsample of 1,000-10,000 humans of that day passed through a brutal, extended bottleneck.
That matches what I have read too, that a small batch of humans left Africa and spread a lot, with only a few other small batches leaving later, and then piles of people died and kept narrowing things. Previous to all that, modern humans evolved in a number of times and locations within Africa, many didn't make it, but various groups did. So lots of human varieties in Africa, only a relatively small set of which spreads out into the rest of the world but then fills it's niches.
It is maybe Rational Optimist that talks about that... I kind of remember Ridley talking about the distinction between basic human tool making that was almost instinctual, with everyone making exactly the same stone hammers, then the jump to cultural tool making where things suddenly had a lot of variety.
What I don't get is - I'm going to assume since he didn't mention Bantus, they do not exhibit this "very-diverseness" - and that confuses me since it seems like they would have picked it up from all the parts of Africa they dominated, even in a short time. So even though I nod along to that Razib Khan piece, I must not understand it very well.
When human groups spread, they often push existing groups before them, what we might today call ethnic cleansing. It doesn't even have to be deliberate. Farms are going to take away animal habitat, and the hunter part of hunter-gatherer. So there might not have been many people for the Bantu to pick up "diverseness" from. Also not uncommon is to take the existing males out of the gene pool, killing or enslaving them.
There is also the simple matter of numbers. The population density of iron-using farmers is at least an order of magnitude greater than the population density of hunter-gatherers. Even random mating with no dispossession would bequeath future generations ten times as many genes from the farmers as from the hunter-gatherers.
That is interesting. I wonder if internal Bantu mixing is more aggressive than external mixing, such that the group differences tend to blend. So if there are Bantus and two rather different groups A and B, Bantus mixing with group A and other Bantus mixing with group B mix with each other such that the differences introduced from A migrate and mix with the differences from B and vice versa. So the Bantu genetics look surprisingly uniform within group, but would look very different from their Bantu ancestors.
We can define words any way we want as long as we have a shared understanding of the definition. That said, I don't see a reason to define intelligence as ability to discern truth. Whether that ability is influenced by intelligence, maturity, or other things, it most certainly changes as we go through life. And what we see as true is hugely influenced by our social circle, so much of that ability-to-discern-truth doesn't even come from within us. Do we believe what we determine is true or what we believe will help us fit in? And which one of those is more intelligent?
Anyway, given that huge difference between us, I see no obvious problem with what you say in this comment.
I don't see most of those as intelligence. Maybe intelligence influences those but it isn't most of those. Anyway, I think it's pretty clear those aren't what Kling is referring to.
"This is in contrast with other personality tests, such as Myers-Briggs, where different test instruments can produce different results for the same person, and where someone’s assessed personality characteristics can vary from year to year."
Between 11:00 and 14:00 minutes of Razib Khan's most recent podcast psychologist Brent Roberts explains the issues with the Myers Briggs test. He also talks at times about the continuity of personality over years and decades with general percentages.
I have no dog in the hunt, but for what it's worth, I've taken MBTI-type tests and 5-factor-type tests numerous times each. The MBTI results are pretty consistent - there's variation, but if you look at the scores as continuous rather than binary on each dimension (which is obviously a marketing-oriented simplification), they come out in very similar places (in my case, on the borderline on one of those binary dimensions). This has not been at all true of the 5-factor-type tests, where my scores have come out all over the place.
While I realize this is a data point of one person, and maybe it's because I'm using "popular" versions of the tests, but it's been so striking that I can't help wondering if the claims about the unreliability of MBTI are actually a driven by something other than actual scientific testing.
Roberts makes the claim that MBTI simply tests four of the big five factors. He doesn't provide his mapping (at least, not on the videos I've seen), and peer-reviewed studies reportedly don't find such a mapping - at least, not in any one-to-one way. He goes on to say that the MBTI "removes the negative factors" like neuroticism and emotional (in)stability, and "took out the negative aspects of extroversion and conscientiousness and agreeableness and openness" to make it more marketable. I'm actually confused by Roberts' claims - maybe he meant "took out the positive aspects of" those things, or perhaps "took out the negative aspects" of not having those things. In any case, (non-pathological) neuroticism and emotional dynamic range, and introversion and disagreeableness and conservatism and even flightiness must have positive evolutionary value or they wouldn't exist. Indeed, one of the flaws of the 5-factor model is the value judgments implicit in its nomenclature: who wants to be labeled "neurotic" or "disagreeable"? - and yet, for example, psychologists make a good portion of their income helping people to become exactly those things so they can be more aware of their emotional state and more effective in their lives. The Big 5 steers the assessment toward a preference for specific outcomes - as Roberts acknowledges. Those preferences would look very different if "neurotic" were labeled "emotionally responsive", if "agreeable" were labeled "unassertive" and so on - which labels would be equally accurate. There's a lot to be said for the MBTI's non-judgmental approach to personality profiling.
"He doesn't provide his mapping (at least, not on the videos I've seen), and peer-reviewed studies reportedly don't find such a mapping - at least, not in any one-to-one way."
The big 5 was empirically derived from the data using factor analysis. They didn't just pick 5 trait scales, it could just have easily been the big 7 or 8 or 10 if it came out that way. So when you take the MBTI and just get rid of the neuroticism trait scale it doesn't just go away, people don't stop having a measurable level of anxiety or neuroticism, it has to be distributed somewhere in the other categories of the MBTI. At least this is probably why you can't get a one to one between the two tests between the four factors of the big 5 because there is all this unaccounted for variance shoved in to the four dichotomous measures of the MBTI.
I originally thought Roberts was being more clear than he is with his description of the statistics. He is being more charitable than most within his profession with regard to the MBTI though. He is acknowledging that the MBTI does have validity with regard to personality and it can't just be dismissed without dismissing the big 5 itself with regard to personality because of the overlap. There are different types of validity however and the development and history of the big 5 isn't just its validity with personality itself. It is a tool that has validity with regard to how well one will thrive within certain types of professions. The MBTI doesn't have validity in this regard.
Yes there is a very explicit bias against MBTI within psych grad schools. It is worth noting that the big 5 is something for Social Psychologists doing research. It isn't actually used by people doing clinical practice. They use the MMPI and/or the PAI.
What about the Flynn Effect? IQ rose by as much as 14 points over just a few generations. I don’t see how that could possibly be genetic. Maybe that involves education, or maybe not, but certainly demonstrates the possibility of big environmental / cultural effects.
Genetics gives an upper bound, based on pre-natal (in womb) development plus SES nutrition, care, & nurture. Sub-optimal nurture reduces the IQ relative to optimal nurture. It clearly “could possibly” be that the Flynn effect has merely reduced the sub-optimal SES edu reductions, allowing Americans to achieve their maximum genetic-nurture IQs. I suspect this is even true. Insofar as a lot IQ questions are somewhat abstract, learning how to do abstract IQ style questions is a skill that can be improved with practice, just as coaching improves SAT test taking skill.
Normal good people don’t like the idea that lower average Black IQs are significantly genetic.
We need a society that explicitly accepts the truth—half of the people will be below avg in IQ. (Median) We need policies, and laws, and norms of behavior so as to help guide them into making responsible decisions, and in jobs, so they can live comfy, middle class American lives. Without college, nor too much abstract thinking required.
All religions do this to some extent.
There is a tendency to focus on genetics, but if genetics gives the upper bound, which I don’t doubt, let’s not forget that there remains a very significant role for culture and environment in IQ.
he's obviously lying. seriously, the inability of the intelligentsia / academia / commentariat to honestly talk about OBVIOUS population group differences in iq and other traits (violence/homicides) is just astounding and cowardly and oh so tiresome. He honestly wants us to pretend to believe that he thinks there's no difference on avg genetically in iq between an Ashkenazi Jew and an aboriginal australian?
come on. He's lying. We know he's lying. He knows we know he's lying. but we all continue this farce. It has to stop.
In the second part of the book (specifically Chapter 10, Triggering a Creative Explosion, pp. 324-5), he pretty much invites us to give a "Straussian" reading to chapter 3:
"If we can't trust that scientists are speaking freely then how can we trust science? Take, for example, group differences and the role of genes that we discussed in Chapter 3. Based on my reading of the evidence, I came down on the side of culture being the primary cause of these differences, but you should only believe me if those who believe otherwise are equally able to express the most defensible version of their position. If the only voice that could be heard in polite circles was mine then how could you know that there was an alternative argument and hear the evidence for it?"
We all know that arguing for the existence of racial differences in intelligence (or time preference or executive function or marshmallow eating or ...) is academic, and in polite circles social, suicide.
IMHO you can't talk about IQ without embracing (in some way) "The Bell Curve", (which is a long and somewhat tedious read. ) But the genetic component of IQ is obvious to all parents, well maybe just the smart parents. And to be on the left is to hate the bell curve. It's a tribal thing.
I suspect for psychiatrists, looking to ameliorate some mental illness, the Big 5 is more useful to help people heal. (Tho Rob Henderson notes each has 2 aspects, so it's more like 10)
For normal folk, non psych researchers, the MBTI 4 factor model has more immediate use. The 16 types, among 4 main temperaments, especially allows more communication understanding.
NT - NF - SJ - SP [These are far more specific than horoscopes, and more understandable]
The 4 axes (Introvert-Extrovert doesn't determine any of the 4 temperaments):
Introvert-Extrovert; iNtuitive-Sensing; Thinking-Feeling; Judging-Perceiving
https://www.themyersbriggs.com/en-US/Products-and-Services/Myers-Briggs
(to get the official names right; below is my memory from years ago)
Each of the 4 temperaments is different AND recognizable.
The names of the axis are admittedly not so good - so I've changed them in my mind.
I'd bet all of the commenters here are iNtuitive - N ("abstract") rather than Sensing - (concrete, specific), and probably most are of the NT (abstract Thinkers) rather than NF (abstract Feelers), where making decisions based on Feelings or Thinking is an important, useful difference.
Rather than Judging-Perceiving, I'd prefer Closure-Open, clean desk vs messy desk. Finishing projects rather than having many balls in the air. For the concrete (Sensing, not so abstract) folk, the J-P difference is more important.
https://www.16personalities.com/personality-types (A slight Alternate description of the 16 types)
This 16 personality model lists the possibilities. Yeah, folk on the border can be either. So for me, I'm an xNTP, sometimes Introvert, sometimes Extrovert. (So Logician or Debater; my guess for Arnold is that he's an INTJ Architect, with plans for everything)
It works. Because it's understandable, and memorable, and usable. In day to day life, especially with co-workers. Also, few folk always fit in any box - but having 4 big boxes which are different but recognizable, is quite valuable.
The book I read years ago was Please Understand Me, by Keirsey & Bates, and there's yet another set of 16 types: https://keirsey.com/temperament-overview/
It's so clear and easy, everybody can understand it and relate to it -- and NOT need to pay a psychiatrist just to "understand" others.
I challenge any who like the Big 5 more to set up categories of people and how to understand them differently based on the category.
Given Arnold's excellent "Three Languages of Politics", which is another simplification, I'm a bit surprised he doesn't like the useful MBTI. Less surprised by money-seeking professionals against a simpler simple that is good enough for 80% of the people, 90% of the time.
Tho the current craze of demonization of oppressors and adulation for victims seems more like mass hysteria, that none of the personality models explain.
"Innate includes genetic inheritance but also development of the brain in the womb."
I don't know if any studies get past the possibility of unrelated correlation but I'm reasonably certain poor nutrition, stress, and/or isolation (limited stimulation) during the first five years or so, with worse consequences at younger ages, will stunt intelligence. If so, we for sure don't know the limits of intelligence gain by optimizing those factors.
Given that, I'd bet that early education could have some impact on intelligence.
<i>Our intuitive idea of someone’s race may not align with a scientific analysis of that person’s genetic ancestry.</i>
We often read this assertion, but how true is it? I haven't seen any studies, but it seems to me that Americans will determine the racial status of anyone they meet within a few seconds as part of the overall scan of status markers. Race is the single most salient factor in American social life. Edge cases notwithstanding, I'll bet our intuitive guesses more often than not line up with the genetic markers.
I've often heard, not always by clearly biased liberals trying to refute "race," that the genetic differences among Africans of different regions are far greater than between Africans and Europeans.
It would be great if someone could provide a confirming or contradicting source.
Since humans began in Africa and the rest of the world pretty much descends from a few populations that left Africa, it is almost inevitable that there is more genetic diversity within Africa than between Africans and non-Africans. Really, the only way this would not be true is if only one or a few African populations survived after the Out of Africa event(s).
But what is the significance of that? If you are arguing that the average intelligence of (sub-Saharan) Africans is the same as non-Africans, you are talking about mean and not variance.
Some of the African populations are very old and diverge quite a bit, which makes for a big variation. But these populations, until recently hunter-gatherers, are now fairly small, since they were forced out of desirable areas by iron-using farmers. Most of those farmers are broadly Bantus, originating around Cameroon, who pretty much swept over Africa starting about 4,000 years ago. They do not have a lot of variation.
Razib Khan explains better than I can.
from July 7, 2021, focusing on genetics:
https://www.razibkhan.com/p/out-of-africas-midlife-crisis
from August 26, 2023, focusing on history:
https://www.razibkhan.com/p/bantu-uber-alles-three-millennia
I only meant that if what I've oft heard is true then "race" does not tell us much about intelligence. And I recognize that doesn't negate what Faze said though I have a different concern about his statement as I state below. What you say may also be true but I don't see that it changes my basic statement.
As I reread Faze's post, I acknowledge I have no idea how much race impacts intelligence. I'd be very surprised if it were zero but I'm very confident that social-cultural factors, such as discussed by you in a different comment, have far more influence on outcome than intelligence difference between races.
I'm not sure how the following is related to our discussion but do you think there is a benefit in assessing intelligence based on eye color?
"I only meant that if what I've oft heard is true then "race" does not tell us much about intelligence."
That's an empirical question. I like the following analogy:
Define two groups of people, people who live in the USA ("Americans") and people who live in Afghanistan ("Afghans"). These groups "have no biological reality". There is nothing that one has that the other doesn't. Some Americans even have ancestors all of whom lived in Afghanistan.
But what if I randomly chose one person from each group and asked you to bet, "Which one is Muslim?" You would win that bet more times than not if you said the Afghan. What if I continued to do that and you continued to answer Afghan? You'd win a lot of money. What if I changed the bet, "Which one has a higher income?" Now you answer, "The American" and you continue to win more often than you lose. Something that has no biological reality gives you important information.
Some people assert that assigning people to three "races" (Negroid, Caucasian, Oriental; black, white, yellow) or three "populations" (Sub-Saharan African, West Eurasian, East Eurasian) can also give you information on the likelihood of various characteristics--EVEN THOUGH THE CATEGORIES HAVE NO BIOLOGICAL REALITY.
The question is an empirical one. Alas, no one who values their reputation wants to seriously investigate it.
Having just listened to the Razib Khan/Brent Roberts conversation, it occurs to me that both The Big Five Personality Traits and the Meyers-Briggs categories are constructs, "social constructs", that have no biological reality. However, many people think that they can often make correct predictions and provide people with insight into themselves. Roberts even casually refers to them as constructs.
The first time I took Meyers-Briggs I thought I got something out of it. Maybe so, maybe not. But I took it other times, sometimes getting much different results, and have become less sure of the benefit. Maybe it's there, maybe not. Either way, it's still very different from IQ tests in EXACTLY the ways Kling mentions.
You have to realize that "race" is not some neat category defined by some definite characteristic. It is not "blue eyes". It's a fuzzy category that is little more than a very big extended family. So, to use American color coding, "blacks" are people most of whose ancestry comes from sub-saharan africa. "Whites" have most of their ancestry from west Eurasia. "Yellows" have most of their ancestry from east Eurasia. These populations were fairly isolated for the last 60,000 years and differences accumulated. Differences in appearance are enough for Americans to categorize pictures into 3 "racial" bins that have a greater than 90% agreement with genomic categorizing into SSA, WEU, and EEU.
That said, it is logically possible for average intelligence to differ in the three bins. There is not some special gene that the people in one bin have that the others don't. There are at least a thousand genes that affect intelligence. One person may have a lot of the variants that are associated with high intelligence. Another person may have few. Everyone will have some. One population may have a greater proportion of people with a lot.
And once again what you say has no errors obvious to me but I have no idea why you think it is relevant to what I wrote.
I was trying to say that which "racial" bin a person falls in cannot automatically tell us how intelligent the person is. However, it could tell us "how to bet". It's the same way knowing whether someone is XX or XY doesn't tell us how tall the person is, but it does tell us that you are more likely to win a bet saying the XY person is taller.
I have heard that as well, though I can't recall from where exactly, from multiple sources. I think Sowell does allude to it in his Race and Culture book, although that focuses a lot more on the different regional peoples of Africa's culture than race per se. Although, it is worth noting that "genetic differences" covers a super broad range of things, from intelligence to height to where your body stores fat and a thousand other things. Just worth bearing in mind, as people often talk from "there are big differences (over a wide range of aspects)" to "the big differences are only in the aspect I care about." I've been seeing that a lot lately.
While cautioning that I suspect we don't know *quite* as much about genes as we think we do, here is Razib Khan explaining (I think) that the difference lies in whether a population has been subject to an extreme bottleneck or not?:
"The genes must be crazy: genetically very-diverse humans
The very-diverse are hunter-gatherer populations who live in clusters scattered across Central and Southern Africa, in Namibia, Botswana, the Congo and a dozen other nations. They include the Khoi, the San, the Mbuti, the Mbenga, the Twa and the Hadza. Inside their DNA, they carry such a dazzling diversity of single-nucleotide-polymorphisms (SNPS), that even two San from different groups both living in Namibia’s Northern Kalahari desert, and speaking click languages from the same family, are more genetically distinct from one another, by a solid 20%, than a person from Stockholm is from a person from Shanghai. That is, they average a rate of 1.2 nucleotide differences per kilobase (1000 SNPs), where a Northern European and Chinese person differ from each other at a rate of only one difference per kilobase. And the San in this example were both from the Kalahari; imagine comparing samples from peoples who live thousands of miles apart!
"The DNA results are in. You are.... NOT genetically diverse (all 7.7 billion of you)
Why are the vast majority of us not-very-diverse and very-not-diverse? And which is which? Genetically, all the rest of modern humanity is one of two similar flavors (or a swirl of the two) with lessened genetic diversity, because along the path to today, we lost most of our diversity. How? Severe population contraction. Inbreeding, if you must. As far as we can tell, all of humanity, at some point in the past 60,000-120,000 years was forced through one or more funnels. And most of our glorious diversity of potential ancestors didn’t survive the successive culls.
"In the case of the very-not-diverse (fully 6.42 billion-ish of us), our models suggest that life on earth threw a funnel across their path, and only 1,000-10,000 lucky humans made it through the impossibly narrow neck. Our best (always provisional) models suggest they dwindled from an earlier population maybe 10 times bigger. So this round of cuts diminished the breeding pool by 90%. ...
"Those 1,000-10,000 human beings who made it through their ordeal, smuggled out in their nuclei all the genetic diversity 6.42 billion very-not-diverse humans among us today would have to draw on ever after. Take a native each from say Santa Fe, Stockholm, Shanghai, Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia, Uluru in the Australian outback and a Sentinelese person from the Andaman Islands and you behold a little of the amazing superficial variety of the human race. They and their relatives have peopled almost every corner of the earth. They speak a riot of different languages and they look nothing like one another. And yet, aside from a dash of Denisovan here and a trace of Neanderthal there, as far as we can tell, they all trace the entirety of their ancestry back to a single founder event about 60,000 years ago. An event when just a tiny subsample of 1,000-10,000 humans of that day passed through a brutal, extended bottleneck.
That matches what I have read too, that a small batch of humans left Africa and spread a lot, with only a few other small batches leaving later, and then piles of people died and kept narrowing things. Previous to all that, modern humans evolved in a number of times and locations within Africa, many didn't make it, but various groups did. So lots of human varieties in Africa, only a relatively small set of which spreads out into the rest of the world but then fills it's niches.
It is maybe Rational Optimist that talks about that... I kind of remember Ridley talking about the distinction between basic human tool making that was almost instinctual, with everyone making exactly the same stone hammers, then the jump to cultural tool making where things suddenly had a lot of variety.
What I don't get is - I'm going to assume since he didn't mention Bantus, they do not exhibit this "very-diverseness" - and that confuses me since it seems like they would have picked it up from all the parts of Africa they dominated, even in a short time. So even though I nod along to that Razib Khan piece, I must not understand it very well.
When human groups spread, they often push existing groups before them, what we might today call ethnic cleansing. It doesn't even have to be deliberate. Farms are going to take away animal habitat, and the hunter part of hunter-gatherer. So there might not have been many people for the Bantu to pick up "diverseness" from. Also not uncommon is to take the existing males out of the gene pool, killing or enslaving them.
There is also the simple matter of numbers. The population density of iron-using farmers is at least an order of magnitude greater than the population density of hunter-gatherers. Even random mating with no dispossession would bequeath future generations ten times as many genes from the farmers as from the hunter-gatherers.
That is interesting. I wonder if internal Bantu mixing is more aggressive than external mixing, such that the group differences tend to blend. So if there are Bantus and two rather different groups A and B, Bantus mixing with group A and other Bantus mixing with group B mix with each other such that the differences introduced from A migrate and mix with the differences from B and vice versa. So the Bantu genetics look surprisingly uniform within group, but would look very different from their Bantu ancestors.
Damned if I know, though. Genetics is strange :D
The words you put in his mouth sound about right to me but in this case I thought he was only talking about education's impact on intelligence.
We can define words any way we want as long as we have a shared understanding of the definition. That said, I don't see a reason to define intelligence as ability to discern truth. Whether that ability is influenced by intelligence, maturity, or other things, it most certainly changes as we go through life. And what we see as true is hugely influenced by our social circle, so much of that ability-to-discern-truth doesn't even come from within us. Do we believe what we determine is true or what we believe will help us fit in? And which one of those is more intelligent?
Anyway, given that huge difference between us, I see no obvious problem with what you say in this comment.
I don't see most of those as intelligence. Maybe intelligence influences those but it isn't most of those. Anyway, I think it's pretty clear those aren't what Kling is referring to.