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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.
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