ApplePie
3d ago
The pay is awful, but I get by with the Early Retirement Extreme mindset of spending as little as possible (e.g. I don't have health insurance and go to a community health center if I absolutely must). The status hit is worse; my family is disappointed in me and no Western woman is going to be impressed with my job. C'est la vie.
Live the dream, random collection of letters I found on the Internet called erwgv3g34! Don't let them grind you down! If I hadn't insisted on having a huge family, you know I'd be knocking on your door on Sunday afternoon asking you if I could have your recycling to take down to the center so I could buy beer!
ApplePie
3d ago
Your attitude strikes me as bizarre. You find work is generally horrible, and yet, you act surprised. Most people rapidly intuit that work something they pay you thousands of dollars for, because otherwise, you wouldn't do it. Why is this hard to understand? Are you a Millennial raised by Boomers or something?
Listen to your Gen X, apple-obsessed buddy: The only non-negotiable element of work is money. Step into your next position with a realistic attitude that says if you do accomplish anything meaningful or have any fun at work, once in a while, ever, that's a good day!
ApplePie
29d ago
if one is left of center, tender minded/idealistic, but libertarian, in they would not be defined as woke, correct?
I had to think about this hypothetical person for a moment.
Although arguably a tender-minded leftist who is also libertarian is as far as 70.53 degrees off from the woke by basic trigonometry, this is only true if you presume each axis is of equal importance. In practice the left-right axis is far more salient than the others, which will diminish this person's ideological separation from the woke crowd enough that they'd likely fit in pretty well. Currently wokeness isn't a fringe movement - it's captured a large degree of public support, and has enough power to have (for example) made it standard procedure for us to have to fill in the "What pronouns does your child use?" blank in the doctor's office at Small Town Red Tribe USA. In practice this hypothetical person is likely to support the woke package, they'll just balk at some of the details, such as shutting down people's right to speak.
Ultimately going to say "No, I don't really think of this person as woke," but it's more because I think it's OK for Canadians to get mad when you call them American, and because despite my anti-wokeness, I'm also rather woke-adjacent. If I were a Trump/Musk/Whatever supporter on the other side of the map, I'd still dislike and oppose the hell out of this person (and probably me as well).
We can agree that fairness is good and racism is bad, but the devil is in the details, no?
I think the woke make a good case against fairness and in favor of racism, in just the same way that the real live National Socialists of the 1940s made a very good case against the principles of German fascism. Looking from one to the other, I can't help but think maybe none of those principles matter, or all of them matter, and really most people are too quick to think they know things when Socrates has been telling us all along he's the wisest because he knows nothing.
ApplePie
29d ago
I'd love to! Mind you, work is picking up for the next six weeks, so if you need this right now I'm going to have to firmly decline. But in around a month and a half, no problem.
ApplePie
29d ago
Although I don't really disagree with most of what's written here, I do think a lot of it comes from intuition rather than reliable empiricism. If you look at what studies actually find, Wokeness is the informal term used to describe people who favor antiracism and transgenderism.
If you don't mind independent research carried out by random posters on TheMotte, then I can also tell you the woke tend to agree on a cluster of issues that are:
- Left of center, in a way that is,
- Tender-minded or idealistic (rather than tough-minded, pragmatic, or realistic), and
- Authoritarian or paternalistic (rather than libertarian)
But if I'm also allowed to speculate with everybody else, I'd say what makes the woke so terrifying is that they have an uncompromising moral vision that no one is really allowed to attack. "Fairness is good, racism is bad" is a blank check America has spent the last several decades writing the woke that allows them to drive civilization to complete bankruptcy. (Where "bankruptcy" here is a metaphor for whatever you think it is, including, heck, not having any money.)
ApplePie
30d ago
Strong dissapointment. Although I was rather skeptical of his findings and approach when I found his blog a year ago, it seemed to represent an alternative and possibly superior methodology to what researchers in psychology have been applying for the last hundred years. So I contacted the blog owner and asked if he would assist me in trying out his approach. He was kind enough to let me use some of his software.
In order to determine whether it worked, I tried his methodology out on colors. We know that the color space is accurately mapped either by RGB or CYM(K), and I hoped to be able to recover this. I couldn't; the space was garbled. This created an awkward situation where I didn't want to come down too hard on someone who seemed young, intelligent, enthusiastic, and entitled to making mistakes as part of the learning process, but at the same time I really wanted nothing further to do with him or his ideas. I don't know what he's been writing since then. (Given your interest I wish I'd saved the results, but they were on an older computer that has since stopped working.)
Ultimately, ideas that one rotation or another of personality space is somehow more correct - or worse, that some personality traits exist at a "higher level" than others - really don't interest me. Maybe I'm a fool who just fails to grasp that personality isn't dimensional, but the tools psychologists have all been using for the last century (including those at vectors of the mind) have been charting out a space with increasing numbers of dimensions, and a factor space by definition can be rotated in any way desired.
Now, the personality trait some call Alpha is interesting in that it's often the first unrotated factor to appear under factor analysis, except that, well, it isn't always the first, and it's not the most heritable. It seems most likely to me that when terms like "respectful," "cooperative," and "hard-working" cluster together, it's simply because humans are extremely sensitive to information regarding whether or not others can be relied upon and worked with. We don't want to date, work alongside, trust, or otherwise team up with jerks. So, we've invented a wide array of terms to describe "good" and "bad" people - but this good-bad axis of personality isn't more heritable than others, and doesn't explain more outcomes than others, so our special interest in information along that axis simply means that other axes received fewer vocabulary descriptors and became harder to explore. This is the main reason why some people here like Fruck or Folamh3 wonder what's going on; the personality space isn't filled out very well with adjectives, and when you try to reach the many areas that are more or less orthogonal to Alpha and other well-delineated clusters, to them you end up sounding like "OK bear with me, I'm thinking of a trait, yeah? It's kindof at the right side of Alpha, but also the right side of not Alpha, so I know it sounds like a combination of good and bad, only it's not, it's nothing to do with that, it's just, you know, to the right. Is that you?" And they either they play the game or you move on.
TL;DR Andrew Cutler is a neat guy, and while I don't agree with him, if I'd found his earlier work 25 years ago I would have been quite enchanted.
ApplePie
1mo ago
Sorry if it seems judgmental. Don't take the survey if it makes you upset.
If you're genuinely interested in the way the items work, though, take a look at the image titled "Factor Analysis Results (Manual Rotation)" from a writeup of an ACX survey: https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/the-big-five-is-incomplete
Let's look at the first item you mentioned, "Active, Talkative." The factor loading on Extraversion is very high at 0.86, and the cross loadings all have absolute values less than 0.15. What this means is that this item actually does an excellent job measuring what it's supposed to, in a way that doesn't pick up contamination from other personality traits. There's something to learn from this: Extraversion is a factor of personality that strongly depends not only on how much a person says, but on a person's overall energy level, while other personality traits don't.
By contrast, if you look at similar questionnaires like the TIPI, you'll see their scales have poor discriminant validity. For example, TIPI Extraversion is found to correlate > 0.3 with Openness according to Brito-Costa, S., Moisão, A., De Almeida, H., & Castro, F. V. (2015). Psychometric properties of ten item personality iventory (tipi). International Journal of Developmental and Educational Psychology, 1(2), 115-121. https://www.redalyc.org/pdf/3498/349851793011.pdf They can't measure Extraversion and Openness independently of one another.
So ultimately, I do hear you when you say, "These questions are weird, and they make me feel uncomfortable," but I am proud of the performance of the items as measured objectively. If this means that I miss out on getting some data from people who frown at the questions and say wtf, that's OK with me.
ApplePie
1mo ago
Well... I did imply it was something like this. But in all honesty it's actually more atheoretical than that: I'm just peeking at Feynman's Chessboard. Questions on a psychometric battery often don't work the way you think they will. For example, there's a new question I'm trying that asks if people are sane. Checking the results prematurely, it just doesn't look like this item does what I wanted it to (though there are others that did).
Generally, when people who've never carried out a study like this talk about the questions I can see them trying to rely on reason rather than on humble empiricism. Why would it be otherwise, when they don't have experience or data to draw from? Reason is the fallback for areas where information is lacking, but it often fails - otherwise, Boston (latitude 42) wouldn't wouldn't be one degree cooler than London (latitude 51) and get more than five times the annual snowfall. There is a reason for that, but without having carefully studied climatological findings beforehand, you're not going to know what it is. Whether we're talking about physics, meteorology, or psychometrics, the data will be what it will be.
ApplePie
1mo ago
Why should they be synonymous? The more synonymous the word pairs are, the less you need two words. The point of having an additional word is to alter the way people answer.
ApplePie
1mo ago
You're not the only one; I wouldn't ask these questions if they didn't work so very, very well. Therefore you must choose: Are you down to earth? Or imaginative? Moral? Or carefree? Active? Or silent? Make your choice! (Or else click the "neutral / ambivalent" option. Like, ambivalence is a thing.)
And thank you also for taking the survey. Every drop of water raises the ocean, especially when the ocean is just, like, 400 drops.
ApplePie
1mo ago
You'd think! However, checking the results prematurely, they clearly are not. Psychology is messy, and the way people answer questions is often tapping into more than merely linear effects. Just consider the kind of person who says "Educated? No! I don't want one of those educated women! But I don't want a dummy either!" Or equally, "Ooh, scientists are hot! Also yeah I love trailer park bimbos... and women with chopsticks in their hair... Hey why is there no chopsticks option?"
Anyway thank you for taking the survey, the Motte is totally rad.
ApplePie
1mo ago
Hey guys, I'm running a survey on romantic preferences, and you've always been great in the past so I thought I'd ask if anyone is interested in participating in the new round.
Survey for people Attracted To Women
Survey for people Attracted to Men
I don't post here much - I had to reregister since it's been months since I last came around and I don't remember my old handle - but you can get a better sense of me find the results of the last survey we did at these pages: https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/honesty-agreeableness-and-sexuality https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/what-they-didnt-tell-you-about-political https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-conservatives
ApplePie
1mo ago
While I'm not a relationship expert, I've had an LDR which eventually fell apart because we were poorly suited to one another; chemistry was great but values and interests didn't align. I've also been married (with kids) for more than a decade to my current partner.
The reason your relationship will or won't work is going to have more to do with your compatability and commitment to each other than any strategy you might have for dealing with physical separation. It sounds like you care about making it work, so do the things you would do in a regular relationship: work to be the best person you can be, listen, make time, and try to maintain mutual friends. This last one is huge; no one really seems to think about how your girl is much less likely to drop you if you're friends with her friends.
Just bear in mind that if this isn't a good match, there's probably nothing you can do to keep it going, and that's really OK. At this stage in your relationship part of the point is for each one of you to try to tell whether it's a good match, and that's not easy to be confident about until you've known someone for over a year. This isn't just true of girlfriends, it's true of coworkers, employees, neighbors, and just about anyone you might know. Enjoy it while it lasts, and good luck that the two of you are right for each other!
You can, but watch out if your IQ is above like 110; keep your head down and castrate your vocabulary or you may soon find everyone else squinting at you in suspicion.
I tried lower-middle class work among some lovely Red Tribe yokels, but made a few missteps early on and rapidly garnered a reputation for being far, far smarter than they were. It did work fine for the first four years, and had a lot of fun with them, but then the Peter Principle saw a petty, insecure moron promoted to the position once occupied by my decent boss, and work became a constant game of bootlicking, kowtowing, and looking over my shoulder. One of the last emails I sent him stated, literally, "I'm sorry you find me hard to understand. I want very much for you to understand me."
TL;DR in a workplace where the average IQ is significantly below yours, beware, for big words = bad words
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