Yeah, people believe the crap they say they believe

This came up once again in comments responding to my post about how the Business Roundtable no longer believes that the primary purpose of corporations is to create shareholder value.

I would say that both sides of the liberal-conservative divide don’t believe that the other side is sincere in their beliefs. Liberals think that conservatives are only full of hate, and everything they say is just bullshit to hide the fact that they are full of hate. And hardly anyone in the United States who isn’t Muslim takes seriously that the people running Iran believe in the literal truth of the Koran and that the 12th Imam is coming soon.

Remember that most corporate leaders live in liberal power centers like New York, Boston, Seattle, any city in California, and they don’t watch Fox News or read Breitbart. They believe what other people in those places believe.

I would say that 60% of corporate leadership has drunk the Kool-Aid, 30% are sociopaths who don’t believe in anything except making themselves richer and more powerful, and 10% have not drunk the Kool-Aid but they are a powerless minority.

Kids with Asperger’s Syndrome don’t (usually) play D&D.

Kids with Asperger’s Syndrome are known for having special interests, but these special interests tend to be things that no one else in the world finds interesting. Like memorizing train schedules. Or they are often taxonomical in nature.

Dungeons & Dragons is the opposite of the Asperger’s special interest because there’s a large community of people who are also interested in it. Furthermore, D&D is a social game, so it’s the least interesting type of game to someone with Asperger’s syndrome who would prefer a non-social game like chess or most videogames.

Kids with Asperger’s Syndrome are also known to have impaired creativity and imagination, and both of those are important aspects of playing D&D.

So if a kid who plays D&D is diagnosed as having Asperger’s Syndrome, it’s probably a misdiagnosis. There’s a massive problem of over-diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome.

However, it’s possible that some kids with Asperger’s Syndrome could wind up playing D&D because they are social outcasts, and the only group that is willing to accept them is another outcast group like nerds who play D&D. (Although I hear that D&D has had a resurgence in popularity and is much less of an outcast nerd thing than it used to be.)

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Jay Fink writes in a comment: “I know an aspie who’s hobby is knowing everything about every amusement park carousel. He knows who built them, in what year they were built, etc.”

That’s a perfect example of an Aspergery special interest.

Mass hysteria?

Read this article about the Halifax Slasher.

Is the same thing happening here with Kavanaugh?

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Read article in Psychology Today: Why Are Females Prone to Mass Hysteria?

Olive oil anxiety?

The first sentence of this Quartzy newsletter article is the weirdest thing I’ve read this weak:

There is a particular feeling of panic and dismay that one experiences in front of shelves stocked with olive oil.

Do people really feel “panic” when they look at cooking oil at a supermarket? Is this a thing?

The black billionaire who believes in IQ tests

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/vista-ceo-testing/559148/

Robert Smith, the richest black person in America (richer than Oprah Winfrey) takes over software and technology companies, and he’s a strong believer in IQ testing.

Applicants to Vista companies, from the entry to the senior-executive levels, are subjected to a timed standardized test.

Testing, Smith says, helps his companies find talented people—people the competition has overlooked because their résumé lacked certain credentials or because of the inherent biases of managers. Smith describes Vista as a pure meritocracy, where high performers succeed regardless of their background, race, or gender. He likes to tell rags-to-riches stories: senior employees who began as a mail-room worker, a roofer, a shelf stocker.

And then the article presents this bogus counterevidence:

Another reason the mid-century vogue for testing came to an end: The tests just weren’t effective. William Whyte once persuaded a group of corporate presidents to take some of the assessments popular at the time. None of the executives scored high enough to be hired by their own company.

That naively assumes the executives were the best people, rather than incompetents who were good at office politics (or even backstabbing people to get to the top).

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Some additional info from the Wall Street Journal:

Former employees say cost cutting is critical to Vista’s model. Some of the companies Vista takes over are located in markets with a high cost of living, such as Southern California or New York City. To tamp down wages and other costs, Vista will relocate part or all of the company to a less-expensive city such as Dallas. Many employees won’t make the move, allowing Vista to hire cheaper replacements. Vista often keeps a company’s headquarters in place and encourages it to expand in lower-cost markets.

Most of the people Vista hires score highly on the cognitive test. Often they are young employees with less-impressive credentials or experience. These HPELs, as they are known, may have gone to state universities and be willing to do a job for $75,000 that an Ivy League graduate in a high-cost market would demand twice as much for.

Vista takes the tests very seriously, using proctors or observing test-takers by video to make sure no one cheats. The test’s purpose, says an executive at a former Vista portfolio company, is to “level the playing field” among employees. The executive says he told a manager who was upset about having to take it that all of his subordinates would be doing so as well.

Former employees say low scorers aren’t fired, but they are less likely to be promoted.

Finding that conservatives are more “authoritarian” and less tolerant was bogus research

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/07/how-social-science-might-be-misunderstanding-conservatives.html

Nice to see a mainstream publication admitting up to this and presenting the compelling research proving that all the older research was massively biased.

Lion’s eleven-factor model of personality

If other people can pull personality factors out of their *ss and call it a model, then why can’t I do it? I present to you my eleven-factor model of personality:

(1) IQ – How can you describe someone’s personality without mentioning their IQ? You can’t. IQ is the most important personality factor of all.
(2) Sociability
(3) Sensation seeking – This and the above factor replace extraversion.
(4) Neuroticism
(5) Future-time orientation
(6) Logicalness and resistance to persuasion
(7) Creativity and interest in new ideas
(8) Orderliness – I think that this factor and Future-time Orientation above replace Conscientiousness
(9) Honesty
(10) Humility (the opposite is Narcissism)
(11) Aggressiveness

Let me know what you think.

Off-the-cuff thoughts about personality factors

There were some comments of the nature “MBTI is bogus, Big Five is real.”

I strongly disagree, they both have elements of reality and bogusness woven into them.

The most real and true personality research was done quite some time ago by H.J. Eysenck, yes he’s the same guy who did a lot of research into intelligence. Just as he believed that intelligence was a biological concept that could be measured, he applied the same ideas to trying to measure personality.

The two biggest factors he discovered, Extraversion (E) and Neuroticism (N) are thus the two most basic personality factors, with E being more dominant. The H.J. Eysenck explanation of Extraversion is more real than either MBTI or Big Five or HEXACO. More recent personality research is mired in political correctness.

With E, one could say that just as there is a general factor of intelligence, g, there is a general factor of extraversion, E, which correlates with being sociable, active, lively, impulsive and sensation seeking.

Later on, Eysenck added a P factor. People who score high on P are aggressive, antisocial, cold and egocentric. Eysenck’s P was then ignored by personality research, until recently when the HEXACO model got created with an “Honesty-Humility” factor, which sounds like a sub-factor Eysenck’s long-ignored P super-factor.

So is MBTI bogus? It’s bogus that MBTI assigns people to either-or, because personality traits are distributed along a normal distribution and most people are average. And I am sure that H.J. Eysenck could measure E a lot better than the MBTI questions. But as I wrote in the previous post, I feel that the S-N (Sensing vs. iNtuition) and F-T (Feeling vs. Thinking) dimensions, although confusingly named, are measuring something more useful and more distinct than Openness and Agreeableness which they are said to correlate with. As I’ve written several times before, I believe that Openness is the most bogus of the Big Five personality factors.

MBTI types of people who read this blog

I believe that most of my readers are INT-

The E-I axis is a typical measure of extraversion vs. introversion, the most dominant of all personality factors. No matter what type of stuff is published on the internet, introverts are more likely to be reading it. Reading stuff is, generally, an introvert activity.

Neuroticism is the second-most important personality factor, but it’s missing from MBTI.

The S-N axis (Sensing vs. iNtuition) is said to correlate most with the Big Five factor of Openness, but I believe that there is a huge difference between the two factors. I don’t believe that Openness is a real personality factor because it primarily measures SWPLness which is a social class and not personality factor. On the other hand, the MBTI test does a much better job of isolating a factor relating to intellectual curiosity and creativity. People high in curiosity and creativity are “N,” so most readers are N. I suspect that the racist readers are more likely to be “S.”

The F-T (Feeling vs. Thinking) axis is a poorly named factor. It corresponds to Agreeableness which is also a confusing name (so maybe Accommodation is a better name). People who are type T (or low in agreeableness and accommodation) are less susceptible to peer pressure and groupthink (in other words, they Think for themselves), which is necessary for being a believer in HBD. I think that just about every reader is going to be T. Donald Trump is a strong type T.

The J-P (Judging vs. Perceiving) axis is correlated with conscientiousness and orderliness. For example, J types like formal to-do lists and always keep their bathroom clean, while P types are the opposite. I personally fall in the middle, which is why the concept of 16 personality types is bogus, because most people will be average for each personality axis. There should really be at least 243 MBTI types, acknowledging three levels for each axis instead of only two. And then if you add neuroticism into the mix, there would be 729 types.

The benefits of psychopathy

In a 1946 article, [American psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley] wrote that the typical psychopath will have ‘often outstripped 20 rival salesmen over a period of six months, or married the most desirable girl in town, or, in a first venture into politics, got himself elected into the state legislature’. [source]

The article I wrote about yesterday talked about psychologists who taught psychopaths “cognitive morality.”

In order to be successful, normal people must learn what we might call cognitive psychopathy. For example, PUAs are teaching a type of cognitive psychopathy to their clients, especially with respect to shady PUA tactics like “negging.”

It’s too bad we live in a society where it’s beneficial to be a psychopath.

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21% of corporate CEOs are in the top 1% of psychopathic traits.