In the big five trait model of personality, those are two different axes. Openness is inventive/curious vs consistent/cautious, and conscientiousness is efficient/organized vs extravagant/careless.
Big Five is identified by taking the top 5 principal components among different descriptors of people, and then rotating them to be more aligned with the descriptors. Unless one strongly favors the alignment-with-descriptors as a natural criterion, this means that it is as valid to consider any linear combination of the traits as it is to consider the original traits.
I don’t see your comparison (focus on intelligence vs vitality) as single-axis either—they may be somewhat correlated, but not very closely.
Mostly life needs to be focused on vitality to survive. The ability to focus on intelligence is sort of a weird artifact due to massive scarcity of intelligence, making people throw lots of resources at getting intelligence to their place. This wealth of resources allows intellectuals to sort of just stumble around without being biased towards vitality.
Interesting, thank you for the explanation. I’m not sure I understand (or accept, maybe) the dichotomy between intelligence vs vitality—they seem complimentary to me. But I appreciate the dicussion.
So in the original text, you meant “openness minus conscientiousness”? That was not clear to me at all; a hyphen-minus looks much more like a hyphen in that position. A true minus sign (−) would have been noticeable to me; using the entire word would have been even more obvious.
Big Five is identified by taking the top 5 principal components among different descriptors of people, and then rotating them to be more aligned with the descriptors. Unless one strongly favors the alignment-with-descriptors as a natural criterion, this means that it is as valid to consider any linear combination of the traits as it is to consider the original traits.
Mostly life needs to be focused on vitality to survive. The ability to focus on intelligence is sort of a weird artifact due to massive scarcity of intelligence, making people throw lots of resources at getting intelligence to their place. This wealth of resources allows intellectuals to sort of just stumble around without being biased towards vitality.
Interesting, thank you for the explanation. I’m not sure I understand (or accept, maybe) the dichotomy between intelligence vs vitality—they seem complimentary to me. But I appreciate the dicussion.
There’s also an openness+conscientiousness axis, which is closely related to concepts like “competence”.
So in the original text, you meant “openness minus conscientiousness”? That was not clear to me at all; a hyphen-minus looks much more like a hyphen in that position. A true minus sign (−) would have been noticeable to me; using the entire word would have been even more obvious.
Fair