Web Excursions 2021-05-11
đ [Post of The Day] Are some personalities just better?
There must be intricate tradeoffs, with each personality occupying a different kind of niche.
This shows correlations between the Big Five personality traits and various personal characteristics.
Blue shows positive correlations,
while red shows negative.
People who are extroverted, agreeable, conscientious, emotionally stable, and open seem to do better at basically everything.
Iâd like to give a list of famous all-blues as examples, but this doesnât seem to exist.
As a proxy, we can look to Myers-Briggs, where all-blues are similar to emotionally stable ENFJs.
The internet claims that examples of ENFJs are Michael Jordan, Oprah, Pope John Paul II, Martin Luther King Jr., Pericles, and Barack Obama.
For the opposite type, famous ISTPs supposedly include the Dalai Lama, Ernest Hemingway, Snoop Dogg, Melania Trump, and Vladimir Putin.
Evolution doesnât care if youâre happy: the ESFP as the most fecund MBTI type (Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Hugh Hefner).
On the one hand, this would explain why everyone isnât an all-blue: If you want to dominate the personality landscape, you need to reproduce more.
There are huge effects like extroverted men having 0.8 more grandchildren than introverted men.
If thatâs true, then we are way out of equilibrium, and future generations will look different from us.
What changes could have thrown us out of equilibrium?
It canât be the dawn of agriculture â thereâs been too many generations for effects this strong to persist.
Fortunately for us, correlations alone are enough to generate the normalized variables (z-scores) that we need to plug into the above regression.
I generated a bunch of ârandom peopleâ either sampling from either an independent multivariate Normal distribution, or a multivariate Normal distribution with the above table as a covariance matrix. I then plugged those people into the regression model and computed a histogram for each.
Correlations among with inputs donât change the fact that certain people (high openness introverts) have fewer grandkids than others (low openness extraverts).
I suspect we really are out of equilibrium.
Modern lives are very different than even 5-10 generations ago,
and it would be strange if this didnât impact how much different people reproduce.
But thereâs no reason to think weâre evolving in an all-blue direction.
A look at presidents
Do successful people still tend to be all-blue?
Rubenzer et al. (2000)Â had multiple expert historians profile American presidents.
Washington is a 98.6% on Conscientiousness. Nixon is a 0.02% on Agreeableness.
Itâs very hard to become president.
If an all-blue personality was better, weâd see that here.
Instead, among recent presidents, we see high extraversion, low agreeableness, and no clear trend otherwise.
If being all-blue doesnât help you become president, does it make you a good one?
It happens that the closest thereâs been to an all-blue president was Lincoln, often considered the best of all.
(He scores low on emotional stability due to his lifelong struggles with depression.)
To be more data-driven, the paper finds correlations between personality factors and how great a president is rated to be.
This is similar to the profile of an all-blue, except that agreeableness is bad, and emotional stability doesnât matter.
Thereâs also value in looking at sub-traits.
Agreeableness has different facets: Tender-mindedness is correlated with greatness, while compliance and straightforwardness are anti-correlated.
The darkness hypothesis
Why are recent presidents usually extraverted and low agreeableness, but otherwise so mixed?
This isnât to say that presidents are all narcissists or psychopaths.
Itâs widely agreed now that ânarcissismâ and âpsychopathyâ arenât discrete categories.
Rather, they are âspectrum traitsâ that we all have to some degree.
How do we arrive at a spectrum of psychopathy?
Itâs the same equilibrium process.
If there were no psychopaths, the first one to show up would probably manipulate everyone and have a thousand kids.
As we get more psychopaths, everyoneâs defenses go up, and the strategy becomes less useful.
Itâs not shocking that these traits might be useful in politics.
Summary
All-blues might really be happier and healthier.
If so, it could a result of late modernity, or it might have always been true.
Still, that doesnât mean that evolution will favor all-blues, or that all-blues are âmore successfulâ.
Other factors (genes, environment) cause both.
If you arenât a psychopath, then correlations arenât something to worry about.
A review of correlations between big five personality types and life outcomes | Hacker News
jawns: I think a lot of this analysis is tautological -- meaning that when you boil it down, you're just saying that things are as you have defined them to be. For instance, take a Big Five trait such as agreeableness. How do we know that a person is agreeable? Because we define agreeableness in a certain way and then measure the degree to which someone conforms to the definition.
mathrando: Articles like this answer the question, "what if 1920s eugenicists got hold of 1980s magazine relationship tests?" The scary thing is a lot of commercial "people analytics" systems marketed to HR departments, lenders, and government agencies are little more than dressed up relationship tests from 1980s magazines
ghaff: The main useful thing about this sort of thing, including the more modern Tilt 365 for example, is that it can be a useful exercise in helping people understand that the way they think about and approach the world differs from how others do.
anbende: Myers-Briggs is justified is not evidence-based and is roundly rejected by modern personality psychology.
The work the author of this piece was describing on the other-hand is one of the most well-researched phenomena in the history of psychology.
It is based on a massive amount of research looking at clusters of personality adjectives found in dozens of languages that tend to cluster along five dimensions.
And the same five clusters are found in virtually all languages (sometimes to include a 6th cluster often called "honesty/humility").
This system doesn't assign types to people, but instead places them on a continuous dimension that is considered to be much more useful.
The 5 dimensions are higher level structures. Within each dimension is a branching tree of complexity that is where the current work lies.
Letâs you and him fight
âletâs you and him fightâ is an old joke.
It dates as least as far back as the early 1930s, when it was a catchphrase of J. Wellington Wimpy, a character in Elzie Segarâs âThimble Theatreâ comic strips, starring Popeye, Bluto, and Olive Oyl.
itâs not supposed to be grammatically correct.
The Oxford English Dictionary describes âletâs you and me (do something)â as an âirregular phraseâ thatâs colloquial in the US.
Its citations date from the 1920s.
The construction was common enough to get the attention of textbook writers, who apparently regarded it as a normal English usage. Their only concern seemed to be that the proper pronoun case be used: âletâs you and me,â not âletâs you and I.â
the joke is that the speaker declines the honor.
ROBIN HOBB - Robin Hobb's Infrequent and Off Topic Blog
The animal is aging. Not surprising; I knew it would happen eventually, but I didn't make any provisions to deal with that eventuality. Somehow the reality crept up on me. And now it must be dealt with, day after day.
When it was young, I drove it hard. The animal remembers every harsh thing I've done to it.
Would I have fed a beloved dog stimulants to keep it working when it needed sleep? Never. Would I have dosed a cat with a mild poisoning of alcohol to relax it among strangers? Of course not.
But this one animal received no mercy from me. And I regret that now.
And so we enter our 70th year together. Me, and the animal I live inside.
Be kind to animals. It's never too late to start.
Why our VPN doesn't use passwords
We wanted to avoid all of this and make it fairly painless for Zapier employees.
We decided YubiKeys and certificates would work best.
The user essentially goes through a one-time setup to log in with their SSO, after which they sync their YubiKey.
This provides them with a profile that they can use, meaning there are no passwords going forward.
We have a playbook for users that are affected by logistics or malfunctioning YubiKeys.
When an employee asks for an exemption, the security team creates for them a VPN profile with certificatesâbut also a password.
After four [automated] reminders (one month) it will disconnect and remove them from the VPN by revoking the certificate and letting them know to ask for another exemption.
Of course, the risk of losing a YubiKey is very real, so we typically recommend one that stays inside the laptop.
Monitoring is a web application that sits beside the VPN in our cloud and is extremely simple and lightweight. It produces metrics from the database such as: Number of total users; Number of users connected; Number of hosts; and other related metrics.