I think the argument in the post is solid in the abstract, but when I think about my own experience I find that even among people I know, high g-factor is strongly correlated with other positive traits, either mental traits (like intellectual honesty, willingness to admit mistakes, lack of overconfidence) or personality traits (being nicer overall, being more forgiving of the mistakes of others, less likely to fall into fundamental attribution errors, etc.)
I see three possible explanations for this:
The correlation in the entire population is strong, and the selection bias I introduce is just on people being smart rather than them being smart + having some other positive traits. In this case my selection threshold looks like a vertical line in the scatter plot rather than a diagonal line, and a high positive correlation would probably survive that kind of thresholding.
The correlation in the entire population is so strong that it remains positive even after correcting for collider bias. I think this option is considerably less likely, because I find it quite implausible that positive personality traits or intellectual habits are that correlated with general intelligence.
I’m biased in favor of smart people and think they are better on other dimensions than they actually are.
I imagine my experience can’t be that uncommon, but it’s interesting to think that due to the collider bias it might actually be abnormal and probably merits some explanation.
As far as I know, there’s no correlation between g and niceness/forgiveness/etc.. Just bringing up the most immediate study on the topic I can think of (not necessarily the best), this study finds a correlation of approximately zero (-0.06) between being nice (Agreeableness) and IQ (ICAR):
I could make up various possible explanations for why you’d see this effect, but I don’t know enough about your life to know which ones are the most accurate.
Thanks for the information. I think the problem here is that my notion of “being nice” doesn’t correlate that well with “agreeableness”, since I find it quite difficult to believe that “niceness” in my sense actually has no correlation with general intelligence.
Still, the correlation I would expect between my own notion and g is ~ 0.2 or so, which is still quite a bit less than the correlation I think I observe.
I think the argument in the post is solid in the abstract, but when I think about my own experience I find that even among people I know, high g-factor is strongly correlated with other positive traits, either mental traits (like intellectual honesty, willingness to admit mistakes, lack of overconfidence) or personality traits (being nicer overall, being more forgiving of the mistakes of others, less likely to fall into fundamental attribution errors, etc.)
I see three possible explanations for this:
The correlation in the entire population is strong, and the selection bias I introduce is just on people being smart rather than them being smart + having some other positive traits. In this case my selection threshold looks like a vertical line in the scatter plot rather than a diagonal line, and a high positive correlation would probably survive that kind of thresholding.
The correlation in the entire population is so strong that it remains positive even after correcting for collider bias. I think this option is considerably less likely, because I find it quite implausible that positive personality traits or intellectual habits are that correlated with general intelligence.
I’m biased in favor of smart people and think they are better on other dimensions than they actually are.
I imagine my experience can’t be that uncommon, but it’s interesting to think that due to the collider bias it might actually be abnormal and probably merits some explanation.
As far as I know, there’s no correlation between g and niceness/forgiveness/etc.. Just bringing up the most immediate study on the topic I can think of (not necessarily the best), this study finds a correlation of approximately zero (-0.06) between being nice (Agreeableness) and IQ (ICAR):
I could make up various possible explanations for why you’d see this effect, but I don’t know enough about your life to know which ones are the most accurate.
Thanks for the information. I think the problem here is that my notion of “being nice” doesn’t correlate that well with “agreeableness”, since I find it quite difficult to believe that “niceness” in my sense actually has no correlation with general intelligence.
Still, the correlation I would expect between my own notion and g is ~ 0.2 or so, which is still quite a bit less than the correlation I think I observe.
Why doesn’t your notion of being nice correlate that well with B5 Agreeableness?