You’re missing the point. While I agree that we don’t want to select too hard for personality traits, the bigger problem is that we’re not able to robustly select for personality traits the way we’re able to select for IQ. If you try to select for Extraversion, you may end up selecting for people particularly prone to social desirability bias. This isn’t a Goodhart thing; the way our personality tests are currently constructed means that all the personality traits have fairly large correlations with social desirability, which is not what you want to select for. Also, the specific personality traits our tests measure don’t seem real in the same way IQ is real (that’s what testing for a common pathway model tells us).
The key distinction is that IQ demonstrates a robust common pathway structure—different cognitive tests correlate with each other because they’re all tapping into a genuine underlying cognitive ability. In contrast, personality measures often fail common pathway tests, suggesting that the correlations between different personality indicators might arise from multiple distinct sources rather than a single underlying trait. This makes genetic selection for personality traits fundamentally different from selecting for IQ—not just in terms of optimal selection strength, but in terms of whether we can meaningfully select for the intended trait at all.
The problem isn’t just about avoiding extreme personalities—it’s about whether our measurement and selection tools can reliably target the personality constructs we actually care about, rather than accidentally selecting for measurement artifacts or superficial behavioral patterns that don’t reflect genuine underlying traits.
I don’t really see any reason why you couldn’t just do a setwise comparison and check which of the extraversion increasing variants (or combinations of variants if epistatic effects dominate) increase the trait without increasing conformity to social desirability.
In fact if you just select for disagreeableness as well that might just fix the problem.
The key distinction is that IQ demonstrates a robust common pathway structure—different cognitive tests correlate with each other because they’re all tapping into a genuine underlying cognitive ability. In contrast, personality measures often fail common pathway tests, suggesting that the correlations between different personality indicators might arise from multiple distinct sources rather than a single underlying trait. This makes genetic selection for personality traits fundamentally different from selecting for IQ—not just in terms of optimal selection strength, but in terms of whether we can meaningfully select for the intended trait at all.
There is such a thing as a “general factor of personality”. I’m not sure how you can say that the thing IQ is measuring is real while the general factor of personality isn’t.
Sure big 5 aren’t the end-all be-all of personality but they’re decent and there’s no reason you couldn’t invent a more robust measure for the purpose of selection.
You’re missing the point. While I agree that we don’t want to select too hard for personality traits, the bigger problem is that we’re not able to robustly select for personality traits the way we’re able to select for IQ. If you try to select for Extraversion, you may end up selecting for people particularly prone to social desirability bias. This isn’t a Goodhart thing; the way our personality tests are currently constructed means that all the personality traits have fairly large correlations with social desirability, which is not what you want to select for. Also, the specific personality traits our tests measure don’t seem real in the same way IQ is real (that’s what testing for a common pathway model tells us).
The key distinction is that IQ demonstrates a robust common pathway structure—different cognitive tests correlate with each other because they’re all tapping into a genuine underlying cognitive ability. In contrast, personality measures often fail common pathway tests, suggesting that the correlations between different personality indicators might arise from multiple distinct sources rather than a single underlying trait. This makes genetic selection for personality traits fundamentally different from selecting for IQ—not just in terms of optimal selection strength, but in terms of whether we can meaningfully select for the intended trait at all.
The problem isn’t just about avoiding extreme personalities—it’s about whether our measurement and selection tools can reliably target the personality constructs we actually care about, rather than accidentally selecting for measurement artifacts or superficial behavioral patterns that don’t reflect genuine underlying traits.
I don’t really see any reason why you couldn’t just do a setwise comparison and check which of the extraversion increasing variants (or combinations of variants if epistatic effects dominate) increase the trait without increasing conformity to social desirability.
In fact if you just select for disagreeableness as well that might just fix the problem.
There is such a thing as a “general factor of personality”. I’m not sure how you can say that the thing IQ is measuring is real while the general factor of personality isn’t.
Sure big 5 aren’t the end-all be-all of personality but they’re decent and there’s no reason you couldn’t invent a more robust measure for the purpose of selection.