[Kednicma]

> Even if all the statistical, p-hacking, publication bias, etc. issues were fixed, we'd still be left with a ton of ad-hoc hypotheses based, at best, on (WEIRD) folk intuitions.

This is the quiet part which most social scientists, particularly psychologists, don't want to discuss or admit: WEIRD [0] selection bias massively distorts which effects are inherent to humans and which are socially learned. You'll hear people today crowing about how Big Five [1] is globally reproducible, but never explaining why, and never questioning whether personality traits are shaped by society; it's hard not to look at them as we look today at Freudians and Jungians, arrogantly wrong about how people think.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#WEIRD_bias

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

[teorema]

I'm not sure that psychologists really even make the distinction between "what is socially learned" and what is "inherent to humans" to be honest. I want to say no one really denies traits are influenced by social factors, but I'm sure you could find some citation to the contrary somewhere.

The Big Five are pretty reproducible in part or in whole, but it's strawman to say psychologists are "never questioning whether personality traits are shaped by society." That's not just not true, nor is it even clear what that question means. Go to Google Scholar and search for "Big Five" and terms like "measurement invariance" or "cultural" or "social" or "societies" and take a look.

The Big Five are meant to be descriptive, the "why" is a different issue. (Just to explain it a different way, let's say you do unsupervised learning of cat images, and find over and over and over and over and over again over decades and different databases that the algorithms always return the same 5 types of cats, plus or minus a little. Wouldn't you make a note of it if you were interested in visual types of cats?) And it's important to remember that some consensus around the Big Five wasn't really until the 90s (even today I'm not even sure there's "consensus" around the Big Five).

I agree that there's a problem with selection of participants, but the only way to do that is to increase participation of the scientific community worldwide. And there are whole fields (cultural psychology) dedicated to the problems surrounding this issue.

The Freudian comparison is also worth commenting on in two respects: first, Freudians got in trouble for not pursuing falsifiable empirical research, which is simply not the case for the things you're talking about. Second, everyone loves to hate on Freud, but the basic tenets of unconscious versus conscious processes that sometimes conflict are still a bedrock of neurobehavioral research, including two-system theories ("fast and slow"), which won someone a Nobel prize and is a darling of cognitive researchers. There are legitimate discussions to be have about the utility of two-system theories but those discussions are far more sophisticated than the criticisms I think you're referring to.

[Kednicma]

You're right that I'm thinking of very basic criticisms. In particular, there's zero evidence that humans aren't p-zombies [0] and no definitive rejection of the Dodo Bird hypothesis [1]; in combination, this suggests that psychologists are both wrong to imagine that there's anything interesting going on inside of a human's mental states, and also wrong to try to classify those mental states into appropriate and inappropriate states. Instead, what ends up getting studied is society's own idea of what ought to be happening inside our homoncular Cartesian theater [2].

Given these foundational issues, it's folly to try to support Big Five or any other descriptive model just by saying that it's a good fit for the numbers. Any principal component analysis will find something which factors out as if it were a correlative component. This dooms Big Five just as reliably as it dooms g-factors or Myers-Briggs or any other astrology-like navel-gazing.

(If you want an example of actual five things showing up again and again and again, mathematics has examples [3][4][5], but it turns out that when actual five things show up, then the reaction is not to serenely admire the correlation, but to admit terror before cosmic uncertainty. Psychologists do not seem to go insane and kill themselves like statistical mechanics or set theorists; have they really seen the face of god?)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo_bird_verdict

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_theater

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_classification

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monstrous_moonshine

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_finite_simpl...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

[friendlybus]

There's also zero evidence that humans are p-zombies, and plenty of criticism that p-zombies don't work as a thought experiment.

It's a pretty big leap to throw away consciousness on the back of equal outcomes in psychotherapy. There are partial rejections of the Dodo bird verdict in your link.

The Cartesian theatre doesn't account for the mind's ability to imagine things that never were. As soon as you account for that via some emergent material property we have an opening to inject the properties of consciousness back into the discussion.

It's easy to say that the Big Five's cross-cultural statistical correlations are not good enough to describe people, though to dismiss it entirely off your grounding is not really going to work?

Repetition of natural structures is common. Many idealised aesthetic styles rely on that, like the Fibonacci spiral. Why would a fixed and repetitive uncertainty be any less terrifying that any other kind of uncertainty? We don't know what's before the big bang or what colour people really see in their mind when we say red.

[Kednicma]

I don't really think that you're cogent here; it seems like you just wanted to say things which stand in opposition.

While it's true that there's no empirical evidence within humans for the question of p-zombies, Occam's Razor neatly shows that the world without souls is the simpler one; both worlds look just like ours, but one of them requires all of these additional unfalsifiable unverifiable claims about souls and consciousness and inner experiences and etc.

The Dodo Bird's strength comes from the multitude of different models of therapy which have existed over the decades. We know, from history, that the memes of psychotherapists leaked out into popular culture and slowly altered how we talk about thinking. Nonetheless people are more neurotic (more diagnosed with mental disorders) than ever before! So the memes of psychotherapy do not on their own decrease mental disorders. People will look back on our current decade and think how silly we were to focus on "medications", "hormones", "chemical imbalances", "neurotransmitters", etc. just like we now think it's silly to focus on "repressed memories", "dream interpretation", "hysteria", "oedipal urges", etc.

Humans cannot imagine anything completely novel. Every thought which a human ever has is unoriginal and hopelessly tied to the human experience. This is known as the anthropic bias and has been known about for millennia. If you believe in souls, you have an uphill battle in terms of evidence, including here.

Please stop believing in souls. There's no evidence for it and it turns your arguments to mush.

[barry-cotter]

The Big Five is a much less impressive accomplishment than you’d think for how much people talk about it.

https://carcinisation.com/2020/07/04/the-ongoing-accomplishm...

> The interesting thing about the Five Factor Model is what it gets away with, in terms of being considered a theory, even though it is not causal, and makes no predictions. What counts as a “replication” of the Five Factor Model, as in Soto (2019), is the following: a correlation is found between one or more factors of the Five Factor Model and some other construct, and that correlation is found again in another sample, regardless of the size of the correlation. In almost all cases, and in 100% of Soto (2019)’s measures, the construct compared to a Big Five factor is derived from an online survey instrument.

> What counts as a “consequential life outcome” is also fascinating. In most cases, the life outcome constructs are vague abstractions measured with survey instruments, much like the Big Five themselves. For instance, the life outcome “Inspiration” is measured with the Inspiration Scale, which asks the subject in four ways how often and how deeply inspired they are. Amazingly, this scale correlates a little bit with Extraversion and with Open-mindedness. Do these personality traits “predict” the life outcome of inspiration? Is “Inspiration” as instrumentalized here meaningfully different from the Big Five constructs, such that this correlation is meaningful?

[konjin]

The people who use Hanlon's razor to explain away malice are both incompetent and malicious. Only someone who is an idiot would ever think to use 'I'm very stupid' as an excuse or explanation why they did something very damaging. If you are smart enough to realize you are incompetent after the fact you were smart enough to realize it before the fact, and that means you were malicious in not recusing yourself.

[harmful_stereo]

The way this was stated in one discrete thought leads me to a problem with human nature i dwell on: how much of what our society and culture is, and what authority is, is just a effort to disguise our frailty and fallibility? It is tremendously hard to be reliable and competitive across multiple disciplines and for the majority of tasks involved in basic human life. There is too big a trade off between available time and location and doing any task well. We are primarily hunting-gathering the easiest ways to meet our needs. How can you blame people for not recusing themselves from participating or misrepresenting themselves as competent when our culture values that and expresses it so dramatically at the highest levels of public performance,from IPOs to high office and everywhere else. Storytelling in the tradition of the heroic myth is mostly about becoming qualified to assume a social role, as an upward stuggle.

It seems built into human character to bite off far more than we can chew, as in free real estate, and then leverage the social value of holding something others are willing to compete for. I think it amounts to a social survival instinct, and i lament how there's very little chance of discouraging people from doing it because of the potential payoff. If anything i think it's a failure of institutions for being built to exploit that competition rather than guard against its excesses.

[Fannon]

Imho we also tend to underestimate the impact of cognitive biases on our own views and behaviors. We are often largely unaware of this. In this case, I find that Hanlon's razor is to simple with the black and white distinction of incompetence and malice. Biases often fall in neither category.

People who view themself as rational / technical might be even more prone to not realizing how much they are affected by this? If your self-image is that you are very rational person (more rational than others), you might be especially prone to denying and therefore not being aware of biases.