[HN Gopher] What Openness to Experience Means
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What Openness to Experience Means
Author : jger15
Score : 35 points
Date : 2022-10-01 14:38 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (thingofthings.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (thingofthings.substack.com)
| cozos wrote:
| I feel like this is overcomplicating it. Openness to experience
| sounds pretty straightforward to me. Openness to Experience
| means... being willing to experience new things. Trying new
| hobbies, learning new skills, yes, but also going to parties and
| doing drugs that all the chads and stacys are doing. Assuming
| that the latter two things are somewhat new experiences - but
| somebody whos not as open would probably not have done those
| things in the first place. I reject that you need go to Escher
| exhibitions while listening to Mozart to be "open to
| experiences".
| mantas wrote:
| Well, refusing to go to Escher exhibition or give Mozart a shot
| is sort of being close-minded...
| brailsafe wrote:
| Unless the cost is ridiculously high and the apparent value
| tenous, much like the parents', but _sometimes_ you gotta go
| mantas wrote:
| Just like other types of ,,experiences". A nice orchestra
| concert in a good hall does not cost an arm and a leg.
| Reasonable tickets to opera are about the same as top-tier
| rock show. Value of those experiences is always subjective.
| Just like rock'n'roll style partying.
|
| And, just like with any experience, you don't need to go
| high-end if you want a good bang for a buck. I would even
| argue that usually best memories and experiences come from
| lower end. Most memorable classic music show I visited was
| a play in a tiny Bavarian village in a 19th-century SPA,
| ticket was EUR5 IIRC. Music was fitting, sound was good
| (but I'm used to shitty rock shows so...), performers did a
| good job (for my dumb self) and overall it was a great
| accent on the whole trip.
|
| I don't like the ,,you gotta go" notion though. Ultimately
| humans have limited resources, both time and money and it
| comes down to priorities. Skipping a section or two of
| experiences does not make one less ,,open minded". But
| calling out people for skipping a section or two does make
| one not ,,open minded" for sure.
| dzink wrote:
| Nuance is awesome. Loneliness comes from people being pidgin-
| holed into general categories that don't fit by prejudice or
| location. Nuance might help them find likeminded people around
| but the search would be slow, difficult, and time consuming
| without the web. Help people seen the nuance in you and you might
| end up a happier person.
| runarberg wrote:
| idk. Could it be that the whole premise is simply wrong here?
| That in fact _openness to experience_ is just not useful as a
| description of personality?
|
| When I talk about openness to experience it means exactly what
| the author is complaining about, openness to try out new food, to
| try to take the train instead of flying, and yes, try some drugs,
| etc. For me--and a bet to most people--it has no further
| implications or generalizations about people's personalities.
|
| And the fact that psychometrisians have--after decades--still
| failed to demonstrate convincingly any such implications or
| generalizations, might indicated that the general public is
| right, and the scientists are wrong.
|
| This isn't nuanced they way that the author thinks it is. Say
| this is how I understand the term, but I bet that when a boss
| talks about it, they think of the willingness to take on new
| tasks and responsibilities within a company (hopefully without
| asking for a pay raise in return), and to an upper class art
| elite it can mean visiting an Escher gallery or a Mozart concert
| (though for me, seeing a no-name punk band is a sign of more
| openness then established brands).
|
| The nuance isn't in the personality of the person believed to
| hold this trait, it is in the user of that term. And I think the
| confusion stems from believing this is some scientifically useful
| term, used to describe a trait of personality that might not even
| exist.
| Bakary wrote:
| It makes more sense to see the OCEAN traits as a general
| strategy mix for a human being. Each trait will express
| differently depending on the context, and the traits will
| intermix with each other. Which is why it makes more sense to
| consider the individual as a whole instead of a trait in
| isolation and with regards to specific situations.
|
| Openness to experience means that the person in question will
| engage more often in idea-related activities. They'll be more
| likely to consider unusual ideas and courses of action as a
| result, and the unusuality of it will be relative to their
| environment. It's a strategy of higher activity and higher
| risk.
| kragen wrote:
| > _in fact openness to experience is just not useful as a
| description of personality?_
|
| No, construct validity for the Big Five has been replicated by
| many researchers.
|
| > _When I talk about openness to experience it means_
|
| When Paula down the street talks about "utilitarianism," it
| means disregard for aesthetics. That doesn't have any
| implications for the validity of Bentham's philosophy or
| whether Peter Singer is likely to decorate his house well or
| poorly. She just doesn't know what Bentham and Singer mean by
| the term.
|
| > _psychometrisians [sic] have--after decades--still failed to
| demonstrate convincingly_
|
| They have not failed. You just haven't read their papers.
|
| > _I bet that when a boss talks about [openness to experience],
| they think_
|
| If a person doesn't understand the concepts they're talking
| about, that's not the fault of the concepts, unless they're
| incoherent. It's the fault of the person who hasn't bothered to
| learn about the concepts.
|
| > _the confusion stems from believing this is some
| scientifically useful term_
|
| The Big Five are among the very few results in psychology that
| are usefully predictive; most of psychology is pseudoscience
| just below the Ancient Astronauts folks. The confusion does not
| stem from believing O2E is a scientifically useful term; it is.
|
| At best it stems from a poorly chosen "improper noun"; if they
| had called it "Hamiha" or "splofth-zeels", this confusion
| wouldn't arise.
| runarberg wrote:
| > The Big Five are among the very few results in psychology
| that are usefully predictive
|
| Predictive of what? Other test batteries within the field of
| psychometrics? I want personality traits to translate to
| actual behavior to consider them scientifically useful. And I
| want the predictive power to be greater then non-personality
| traits like religion, political affiliation, etc. Tell me of
| a research which demonstrates that convincingly. I certainly
| haven't found it.
|
| Other psychological fields have no problem doing this. For
| example neuroscience show a remarkable behavioral difference
| of people with specific brain damage, cognitive science shows
| similarly stark difference in behavior if e.g. some people
| have been primed with a similar stimuli, and even behavioral
| scientist can demonstrate that animals will behave radically
| differently after a certain behavior has been reinforced etc.
| You may call this pseudo-science, but what I call pseudo-
| science is when scientists make up new terms, operationally
| define them, and then validate them by correlating them with
| each other, without showing any use for these terms out side
| of their narrow field.
| kragen wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#E
| f...
|
| I don't think neuroscientists would appreciate being called
| psychologists, and priming research has replicated poorly
| enough that I'm comfortable calling it pseudoscience. And,
| although some predictions of behaviorism _have_ been borne
| out, behaviorist psychologists publishing unreplicable
| experiments were Feynman 's specific target in _Cargo Cult
| Science_.
| runarberg wrote:
| How many neuroscientists do you know? I know a couple and
| they are very aware of the fact that their field is a
| study of human behavior and knowledgeable of their how
| much fields intersects with other fields of psychology.
| Most undergraduate degrees of psychology that I know
| indeed offer an introductory course to neuroscience, and
| I know many professors of neuroscience contribute to
| research in other fields of psychology and vice-versa.
|
| > priming research has replicated poorly enough that I'm
| comfortable calling it pseudoscience.
|
| You might be thinking of social priming which indeed is
| pseudo-science. Cognitive priming on the other hand is
| really easy to replicate, however the interpretations of
| the effect is often way out there (as is often with fresh
| discoveries in science [I mean just look at cosmology and
| all their wild interpretations of e.g. the dark matter
| discovery]). Given that I understand your skepticism, but
| the effect is there, it is easy to find, and has been
| replicated many times (I even did a short priming study
| during my undergraduates).
|
| > _Effect of personality traits through life_ (Wikipedia
| link)
|
| If you read this section it proves my point well, earlier
| I said:
|
| > I want personality traits to translate to actual
| behavior to consider them scientifically useful.
|
| And this wikipedia article summarizes in the sub-section
| _Scope of predictive power_ :
|
| > The predictive effects of the Big Five personality
| traits relate mostly to social functioning and rules-
| driven behavior and are not very specific for prediction
| of particular aspects of behavior.
|
| In other words: Personality traits are mainly predicting
| constructs within social psychology which are also
| measured with similar tools as those used to measure the
| traits in the first place. Most of the correlations are
| to self reported or other batteries from psychometrics.
|
| This quote from the _Personality Disorders_ exemplifies
| my criticism:
|
| > Noticeably, FFM publications never compare their
| findings to temperament models even though temperament
| and mental disorders (especially personality disorders)
| are thought to be based on the same neurotransmitter
| imbalances, just to varying degrees.
|
| This looks like a scientific dead end to me. This is as
| if dark matter would only predict gravitational
| deviations and not e.g. the cosmic microwave background
| or gravitational lensing. Dark matter was discovered by
| exploring these deviations, and if it would have failed
| to predict anything outside of that narrow scope, it
| would be a pretty poor theory. This has been the status
| of Big-5 (and other personality traits) for about the
| same amount of time since the discovery of dark matter.
| kragen wrote:
| Just a couple, as well, and my grandfather did
| neuroscience research.
|
| I guess it's true that things like the IAT show a strong
| and easily replicable cognitive priming effect, I just
| hadn't thought of it that way. But the replicability
| problem isn't limited to social priming; https://en.wikip
| edia.org/wiki/Priming_%28psychology%29#Repli... talks
| about other forms of priming that have experienced
| replication problems.
|
| Several of the Big Five predictive effects mentioned in
| the WP page do go beyond self-report instruments, even
| though it's true that there are many more correlations
| with other self-report instruments. A few of them are
| large effects.
| kragen wrote:
| It's probably worth reading
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openness_to_experience before
| commenting here.
| pydry wrote:
| >Unfortunately, a lot of people I talk to are confused about what
| Openness to Experience means. They assume it refers to whether
| you take drugs, have casual sex, go to wild parties, go
| hitchhiking, fly across the world on a whim, and so on.
|
| The whole article is about how his friends think that being open
| to experiences means automatically being into bungee jumping
| rather than just being willing to try it.
|
| This seems... rather obvious.
| SQueeeeeL wrote:
| Yeah, a lot of this feels like a really elaborate "dunking on
| mainstream people", which, yeah of course they aren't that open
| to experience. The material conditions of consuming profit
| driven TV and living in the suburbs aren't very condusive
| towards broad horizons. But it's presented in a
| 'classification' fashion so that you can feel try to group
| those you meet and immediately feel superior to them, rather
| then be empathetic
| mantas wrote:
| What living in the suburbs have to do with it?
| SQueeeeeL wrote:
| Living in the suburbs seems pretty equivalent with this
| lack of experience phenomenon, just basically a lack of
| association with other people and experiences. He even
| explicitly mentions PTA meetings and "Live Laugh Love"
| signs, which are both pretty associated with white picket
| fence Americana.
|
| Maybe there's a lot of people living in Manhattan whose
| main concern is their 4th graders position on the football
| team, but I somewhat doubt it
| mantas wrote:
| For me it looks like the same issue of rock'n'roll
| partying vs Mozart.
|
| There're many city folks who don't have a wide range of
| concerns. Eating out in a different restaurant or going
| to yet another rock show or doing yet another drug after
| some time stops being a new experience.
|
| At the same time, tending your garden is an experience as
| well. Especially anything beyond a simple lawn.
| Ultimately spending every weekend in your backyard is as
| novel as visiting bars and parties every weekend.
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