New England is the core of the Uninhibited region? #slatepitch
I wonder how much influence Northern Virginia had on making the state relatively "relaxed and creative". I bet that as you head south in the state it gets less and less so.
I really should have become a social psychologist. The scope for being able to bullshit creatively seems basically unlimited, and you don't have to worry about clients or court deadlines.
Texas is essentially none on any of the measures, but the way they colored the maps, it registers only on the Temperamental & Uninhibited one. Which, Ted Cruz aside, is not actually how I perceive my community.
Are you kidding? I'm practically iridescent against this dull backdrop. Whereas if I lived somewhere colorful, I'd barely be a blip.
Our approach to addressing this
issue provides an entirely novel perspective on geographical personality
differences
urplesque!
The former boy scout camp where we take the dog has a flock of wild turkeys and a flock of wild peacocks. I wonder what they think of each other. And what it would be like if they interbred.
I can't believe you people are making me do this, but the actual paper seems like it isn't bad at all. It relies on a measure (the Big 5 personality test) that I personally find weird but which is incredibly well validated and commonly used, they were really pretty careful about how they did the meta-analysis of other surveys (including checking that the results cross-validate between surveys with different methodologies), and the conclusion they draw (that despite the fact that -- duh! -- individual people within a state are incredibly heterogeneous, there seem to be quite reliable regional differences) is interesting and not obviously a priori true. Also, the names that they gave to the regions are just shorthand ways of describing cluster profiles; if you look at figure 1 in the paper it's a lot more clear what the clusters mean (in terms of the Big 5, at least).
Note that 11 is not inconsistent with this being total bullshit. Science!
urplesque!
I was gonna say not only completely novel but when you find out the big secret it turns out to be literally (in the paradigmatic case) full of shit but then Tweety had to ruin it with his 11.
Since Moby brought it up: has this been linked?
It sort of is, though. The actual empirical claim -- that there are reliable geographical clusters of differing responses to the most widely used psychological measure of personality -- seems both pretty unassailable based on their methodology and useful, especially since that measure is used for all sorts of purposes, including I believe clinical ones. Saying that the Big 5 is a stupid measure in a lot of ways (you could talk me into that pretty easily) basically does nothing to hurt this paper.
15: Internal vs. external validity issue, then.
14: I've linked to it twice, at least, and I wasn't the first to bring it here.
(Incidentally, if you would like to read somebody writing about how the Big Five is a stupid measure in a lot of ways, have at it, via Cosma.)
That is, linked to the dino porn lady, not to that particular piece. That piece might be new.
Yes, I know the books themselves were linked to.
The thing that strikes me as most likely bullshitty about the paper (I could be convinced otherwise, and no I haven't read the paper in any way other than skimming it) is that the thing they are measuring, the purported "personality" traits, are extremely unlikely to be separable from the other social factors that produce them. So, we've long known that people on the West Coast are, for example, less religious and more "individualistic," generally, about social issues, than people on either of the coasts. That's been known for a long time and is true for a bunch of largely historical reasons. Defining the set of personality "clusters," and identifying the traits that they have, that they have doesn't really tell us much of anything about "personality" other than that you can create certain definitions for "personality" that reveal information provided by other social indicators -- and nothing at all about people's inherent "personality" as distinct from their social context. So the paper could be formally well executed as per 11 but in fact add little to nothing to our store of actual knowledge, hence the bullshittyness.
I clicked through the dino porn link, and saw that one of the titles referred to a stegosaurus. And thought, "Pornography about a stegosaurus? That's really weird."
I don't know what it says about me that I find I have distinct opinions that there are some species of dinosaur it's weirder to fantasize about having sex with than other species, but I find that I'm uncomfortable with that piece of self-knowledge.
23: but again, that's not what they're trying to do. They aren't trying to claim that they're measuring innate or inherent personality. They're trying to claim that for whatever reason -- culture, social factors, sure, fine -- there are specific geographical clusters of personality types that show up. This is important and useful because people use this personality measure like it's basically independent of (for instance) what state you live in, when it's really not. So if somebody wanted to publish a paper claiming that performance on some other task correlated with extraversion, and they had a sample of Berkeley undergrads, then this would be an important counterargument that they'd have to address. So, really, they're helping the rest of personality psychology be less bullshitty, by your standards. You know, ideally.
23: The word you are looking for is "spurious".
Come to think, it's perfectly possible that I'm just less weirded out by biped porn than quadruped porn. Given that that's an explanation that doesn't require me to have been subconsciously rating dinosaurs as plausible sex-objects, I think I'll assume that's it.
OK, that makes sense, but the part excerpted by "Gizmodo" is the following:
There is overwhelming evidence for regional variation across the United States on a range of key political, economic, social, and health indicators. However, a substantial body of research suggests that activities in each of these domains are typically influenced by psychological variables, raising the possibility that psychological forces might be the mediating or causal factors responsible for regional variation in key indicators.
So it seems like they really are trying to say [or at least imply] that psychological forces are "mediating or causal factors responsible for regional variation" when in fact their research doesn't really show that. Or at least that's the bottom line message that the public is going to take from it -- hey Californians have a laid-back personality science proves it!!
27: Given how sexually charged the dinosaur displays are in museums these days, few people can avoid thinking about the topic completely.
I'm going to assume a linear relationship between legs how queasy you feel about an object for sexual fantasy. Snake > person with amputation > unaltered person > dog with amputation > dog > octopus > squid.
Snake > person with amputation > unaltered person > dog with amputation > dog > octopus > squid.
All at once! Orgy! But i never ever watch that kind of anime.
And I am fucking not at all motherfucking temperamental or uninhibited.
Is temper-a-mental really right? That sucks, should be tempermental, and somebody needs to fix it. Sounds like an obsession with breaded shrimp
This seems to be an appropriate thread to link to this great thing: DSM-5 reviewed as literature
Over two inches thick and with a thousand pages, it's unlikely to find its way to many beaches. Not that this should deter anyone; within is a brilliantly realized satire, at turns luridly absurd, chillingly perceptive, and profoundly disturbing.
If the novel has an overbearing literary influence, it's undoubtedly Jorge Luis Borges. The American Psychiatric Association takes his technique of lifting quotes from or writing faux-serious reviews for entirely imagined books and pushes it to the limit: Here, we have an entire book, something that purports to be a kind of encyclopedia of madness, a Library of Babel for the mind, containing everything that can possibly be wrong with a human being. Perhaps as an attempt to ward off the uncommitted reader, the novel begins with a lengthy account of the system of classifications used - one with an obvious debt to the Borgesian Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, in which animals are exhaustively classified according to such sets as "those belonging to the Emperor," "those that, at a distance, resemble flies," and "those that are included in this classification."
One problem with the Big 5 is this: suppose that human psychology can be described as a five (or more) dimensional space. Then take any 5 random things that you measure -- if you're not very unlucky then those five things will span the space of possible measurements. So the only thing we can say is that there are 5 or more degrees of freedom in describing human behavior.
So it's unsurprising that variation across regions shows up as related to the Big 5. I suppose it's a contribution if there were researchers assumed that there was no violation in human behavior across geography, but those people are fucking morons.
NSFW">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ctu-X0Ivgw">NSFW Big 5
They're trying to claim that for whatever reason -- culture, social factors, sure, fine -- there are specific geographical clusters of personality types that show up.
No fancy scholarship or research methodologies necessary. I live among a cluster of passive-aggressive people who suck at driving, and I defy the social psychology types to prove me wrong.
no violation in human behavior across geography
You mean like not crossing state lines for immoral porpoises?
For much of the novel, what the narrator of this story is describing is its own solitude, its own inability to appreciate other people, and its own overpowering desire for death - but the real horror lies in the world that could produce such a voice.
I may be the first person in human history to mix up the words "variation" and "violation". Suck on that, Big 5! You have to add an extra dimension just for me!
There are actually four personality types, represented by the Big Four of the Central Pacific Railroad. Are you more of a Crocker or a Leland Stanford?
My research shows that there are seven personality types, each represented by one of Elizabeth Taylor's husbands.
There were two Crockers in the early years.
It's like college conferences. It's still the Big 5 but there are 7 types with two more scheduled come in for the 2015 football season.
The one true Big 5 is still only 5 schools.
28 is reasonable, although what it's complaining about is the whole edifice of personality psychology, which is... reasonable to do. So, okay. Fie on them!
43 Theodore Judah, you anti-Semite Episcopalian.
|| Quick advice needed. Can go to free Neil Young documentary Year of the Horse tonight. Or can stay home and do nothing. |>
Erm. I must be suffering from some cognitive failure. I cannot see how to embiggen the maps at the gizmodo link in the OP. Maybe it's a failure of eyesight; I'd thought to view a larger map showing more detail. Totally not seeing how to do that.
Or can stay home and do nothing get drunk.
Go! You're a carpe diem sort of chap.
Whereas Frowner and RFTS are more carpe book in bed sorts of chaptresses.
This is usually where I come in and badger people to take the enneagram test, but I guess I should badger states to take it instead. California, are you a 7 or a 4? New York, you are an 8 or a 3.
The guy who started Scientology came from Tilden. Trust me, you don't want to get involved with people from Tilden.
That might be something else. Never mind.
Speaking of books in bed, like Halford (that was pre-Masshole identity,right?) I devoured and adored werdnA's book on fishing in Sweden and a whole lot more. It's given me a lot to think about in terms of how societies structure themselves and how relationships work and don't, but I think I'm particularly grateul for the fishing narrative. I learned so much from that but also connected to the history and deliberate quasi- timelessness of taking it on as being equivalent in so many ways to the knitting and now hand-sewing that have captivated me. I'm very grateful I read it and am sure I'll reread soon, which he could probably explain with a deft fly-fishing metaphor.
OT: Speaking of personalities, if you plan to hold yourself out to investors et al. as a senior executive with experience managing professionals, it would behoove you to be able to tell when one of them is extremely angry at you.
Well, either, really, but I'm a professional and I am still teeth-grindingly pissed off, as who would not be when the interlocutor's attitude is "Now let me tell you -- again -- how disappointed I am that you haven't been more enthusiastic about eating shit without pay."
I'd misread which person you were in the story.
Where I live was deliberately excluded from the study, for what actually seem like totally reasonable methodological reasons.
The scien/to/logy dude was from the park on the eastern border of Berkeley??? I will never think of the steam trains the same again. Very sad. Was he raised by wild coyotes, Romulus n Remus style? Or in a cave, more Picts N Martyrs style?
I don't know what it says about me that I find I have distinct opinions that there are some species of dinosaur it's weirder to fantasize about having sex with than other species
I recently fulfilled a lifetime ambition by turning to the soldier seated next to me in the Huey during infiltration, offering him some gum (alas not tobacco) and saying "This stuff will make you a goddamn sexual Tyrannosaurus. Just like me."
It was only afterwards that I thought "Tyrannosaurus? As in 'small vestigial appendages of no known function'? Wouldn't it be better to be, say, a sexual Deinonychus?"
...a goddam sexual Tyrannosaurus.
1. Weighs 5 tonnes
2. Effectively no arms
3. Breath smells of carrion and untreated broken teeth
4. Can only do it standing up, or with access to a construction crane to help get up again
Yum.
58: Wait, so werdnA is a bassmaster? The plot thickens!
with access to a construction crane
TELL ME MORE.
58: thank you, too, Thorn. I am so glad to have got across some of the point of that to people who don't and would never fish. On the othe rhand, if I had only spent my time writing FIVE THOUSAND WORDS A DAY of dinosaur porn, I would not now have any financial troubles.
69 was me, of course. And so is this.
Is a bassmaster like Ogged's ex only male?