[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?