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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   36359 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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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

Seeing that you're sampling this place, how would you feel about picking up the mantle and doing a survey of TheMotte? I don't think anyone has done one in a while. There's been a couple, but TracingWoodgrains did the last major one that I can recall. He shared the results here.

You could do whatever including keeping those same questions or making new ones. Probably would be helpful to have mod approval. Generally, but also so they can pin it at the top of a few threads to create a proper collection period.

Look, I want to make this process of me talking you into doing something as easy as possible.

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.

Sounds good to me!

To be clear I am not a representative in any way and I don't need anything. It'd be fun to read updated data, count witches, and the other fun stuff.

I'll alert Mom with a ping so she can decide if the tentative plan is acceptable.

@Amadan I see you have a recent post so I'll ping in the hopes you can pass the idea on to the team?

I'm curious why you ask "I'd like a partner who is..." and two of the options are "educated" and "uneducated". Surely the response to one of these on a Likert scale is just the inverse of the response to the other?

Not necessarily. Just as one might be turned on by both women and men, so might one find both "educated" and "uneducated" to be appealing qualities.

To me, that sounds more like a person's educational attainment is irrelevant to how attractive you find them.

Perhaps one cannot stand people who are only moderately educated.

Absent more context, I'd consider uneducated to mean dropped out prior to graduating high school and educated to mean has a college degree. I could definitely see there being room for someone to not want someone uneducated but being indifferent about educated.

I'd consider uneducated to be highschool, normal to be bachelors, educated to mean an advanced degree

Some reasons I can think of

  • check how consistent respondents are
  • capture people who are attracted to both extremes
  • capture people who are neutral towards one but attracted towards the other

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.

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.

I'm looking forward to seeing the results and the analysis!

For what it's worth, on page one I was a little irritated with your two-word pairings several times. I'm often one, but not the other - so if asked on their own, I would have given different answers. Examples are:

  • "Active, Talkative"
  • "Down-to-Earth, Unimaginative"
  • "Amoral, Carefree"

Agreed. I decided not to fill it out on this basis.

People sometimes do.

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.

Seconded, many of these adjective pairs aren't really synonymous. Many people are active (in the sense of being physically fit) but not talkative, and vice versa. "Carefree" to me suggests "lacking in neuroticism/anxiety", not lacking in moral principles.

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.

You make a good and interesting point, but I think it was a bit of a misstep, because like @Folamh3 says there is a typical format that everyone is used to, and so we naturally try to fit your scheme into it and end up confused, and it even feels a bit judgemental. Next time you do a survey like this maybe just explain what you are going for - instead of "I see myself as" go with something like "How do you align with these obverse emotions? It's not nearly as punchy like that but you get the idea.

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.

I ran across a substack at some point—vectorsofmind.com—whose old posts were saying that the big five had some bad methodology, and that we can do better, and get some different factors, but I don't know enough to assess what it was saying. (Looking now at the titles, the more recent posts seem significantly sketchier.) Anyway, I'd be interested in knowing what you think of the old articles.

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.

Thanks, I really appreciate the take, and will trust you know what you're talking about.

Sorry, text based conversation is not my wheelhouse. I used misstep to imply that I thought it was good but not perfect - not mistaken, but there is room for improvement. I would also be proud of the construction of this survey, I did it before I engaged the thread and I think you did a great job, but there have been people who bounced off it because they didn't understand what you were going for in that question. So I thought back to when I did it and what I was thinking, and my thinking was "these are unusual modifiers, how do they change my response from when they are by themselves", but I am hugely attracted to novelty in general. I then thought back to why I initially thought it was unusual and came to the conclusions I mentioned - it looks like it follows the typical structure but doesn't, and a tinge of judgement.

I think if the people who bounced off it understood what you were going for, they probably would have done the survey (I know the terms you used aren't exactly obverse, but it at least conveys the idea that you don't think these things are necessarily tied) and while I understand you are cool with people not doing it if it makes them uncomfortable, I figured a change to the structure of the question would be a simple way to get a few more respondents in the future that wouldn't impact the results.

Normally when a personality questionnaire asks you to rate how accurately an adjective describes you, they either use a single adjective (neurotic) or a series of closely related adjectives (anxious, worrisome, moody). This is the first time I recall seeing a questionnaire asking me how much a group of (to my eyes) completely independent adjectives describes me.

Yeah, and even if you go by context, it doesn't work. I'm active in conversation - but not talkative. I prefer to ask questions, and have other people do the talking. This often means I steer the conversation and keep it going, but hearing what I say isn't that interesting to me.

yeah, same.

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