4/ Broad domains each contain six facets: co-related but distinct behaviors.
For example, Extraversion splits into: Activity, Assertiveness, Excitement-seeking, Gregariousness, Positive emotion, & Warmth.
5/ @jordanbpeterson's paper suggests there is an "intermediate level of personality structure between facets and domains" called Aspects.
@jordanbpeterson writes: "Reasons exist to suspect that this level might be both interesting and important."
6/ Think of Aspects as two poles within Domains.
Conscientiousness: Industriousness & Orderliness
Agreeableness: Compassion & Politeness
Neuroticism: Volatility & Withdrawl
Openness: Intellect & Imagination
Extraversion: Assertiveness & Enthusiasm
7/ Aspects of the same domain differ from each other in fascinating ways.
Take Conscientiousness. Industrious people prefer productivity; orderly people prefer tidiness.
8/ Conscientiousness has "both proactive and inhibitive aspects."
Proactive striving for achievement v/s inhibitive instincts like caution.
9/ Agreeableness splits into Compassion & Politeness.
Compassion = emotional warmth
Politeness = reasoned cooperation
The former is based on feelings; the latter is "cognitively influenced."
10/ Neuroticism's two aspects are differing responses to threat.
Volatility = externalizing stress.
Withdrawal = internalizing stress.
Volatility manifests as hostility and panic. Withdrawal manifests as anxiety and depression.
11/ Openness is an amalgam of two desires.
Intellect desires truth.
Imagination desires beauty.
Imaginative people seek "aesthetics and fantasy" while intellectual people seek "ingenuity and ideas."
12/ Extraversion comes in two different forms:
Assertiveness: The desire to be important in social settings
Enthusiasm: The desire to be sociable
Assertive people are provocative & exhibitionistic.
Enthusiastic people are friendly and display positive emotions.
13/ Aspects make the Big Five Model richer conceptually, and more useful practically!
There are lots of interesting relationships between the aspects too.
Example 1: Assertiveness is negatively correlated with Politeness but Enthusiasm is positively correlated with it.
14/ Example 2: The negative correlation between Conscientiousness and Neuroticism is among "the most robust correlations in the Big Five."
But this is misleading.
Industriousness is negatively associated with Neuroticism, but orderliness is "significantly positively correlated"
15/ Domain to domain comparison was "suppressing" the more nuanced truth that is revealed by an aspects-level analysis.
From the paper: "Given two people with equal levels of Industriousness, the one higher in Orderliness is likely to show higher levels of Neuroticism. "
16/ @jordanbpeterson draws on previous research to show that aspects within a domain may have distinct genetic origins.
17/ For instance, within neuroticism, volatility may be rooted in the Fight or Flight(FF) response & withdrawal may be rooted in the Behavioral Inhibition System (BIS).
FF may manifest in behavior as panic and hostility; BIS as chronic inactivity.
18/ Hope you enjoyed this breakdown!
This paper was hard but rewarding to read. Shoutout to @jordanbpeterson's co-authors: @LCQuilty and Colin G. DeYoung!
19/ Publishing next week: key ideas and insights from @JonHaidt's most cited academic paper!
• Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
• Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883)
• The Will To Power (1888)
Meet: "The Nietzsche Haus." Here are some pictures and stories from my recent trip...
1/ The Nietzsche Haus is in Sils Maria, a charming town deep in the Swiss Alps. Right next to the town is Lake Sils. Fed by glaciers, it has the highest boating line in Europe. I'll show the boat ride video, but first, see the streets Nietzsche walked as he dreamt up his books...
2/ Nietzsche Haus is an independent museum now. For me the best part was the Nietzsche Library, a room with 4000+ books on the bad boy of philosophy. Found 3 interesting books:
• Nietzsche, The Aristocratic Rebel
• Reading Nietzsche Rhetorically
• Nietzsche's Epic Of The Soul
A literary rockstar at 24. Almost executed by a firing squad at 28...
Exiled to Siberia. Returns to write some of the greatest books ever...
In his lesser-known letters and essays, we get a more intimate look at what he loved, hated, fiercely believed in
Dig in👇🏻
1/ Dostoevsky believed life is only possible when you have a philosophical north star you swear by:
"Neither a person nor a nation can exist without some higher idea"
Dostoevsky: "In order to maintain itself and live, every society must necessarily respect someone & something"
2/ In his essay against Environmental determinism, Dostoevsky writes:
"The doctrine of the environment reduces man to an absolute nonentity, exempts him totally from every personal moral duty and from all independence, reduces him to the lowest form of slavery imaginable..."
Elon Musk reminds me of Carlyle's 1841 book on heroes. Carlyle wrote the single most important quality in great men is their sincerity. They stand directly upon reality, not upon the consensus, the status quo, the norms. Elon calls it first principles thinking, but same thing
Short-term incentives always tell you to ignore baseline reality and respond to office politics, interpersonal drama, status games. You require a strange combination of high IQ, low agreeableness, high openness, low neuroticism, to ignore the short-term & deal with reality as is
Elon Musk is also a lesson in why we need ostentatious wealth. Thank God he made $150 million on PayPal. Without that windfall...no SpaceX, no Tesla, no Starlink, no free speech on the internet. Someone will always wield power. Better driven men than faceless bureaucracies...
Yesterday, Elon Musk unveiled the Robovan, and it was Art Deco
Why is this dead 1920s movement making a comeback?
And who killed it in the first place?
A thread with all the answers...
1/ Art Deco began with a breakup. Now called the "Vienna Secession" a bunch of visionaries resigned from the "Association of Austrian Artists" in 1897 to chart new territory. The hero's journey begins. Their first project - the "Secession Building" in Vienna (still standing)
2/ The Vienna Secession had painters (Klimt), advertisers (Josef Maria Auchentaller), architects ( Josef Hoffmann), and more. Their vision was to promote "Total Art," combining music, geometry, interior decor, architecture, painting, and other forms in dizzying new ways...
59 years ago, a French theologian tried to warn the world about it...
12 insights from Jacques Ellul's Propaganda (1965)👇🏻
1/ Modern man can "never stop to reflect." He's not allowed to synthesize his information. Rather, Ellul writes: "One thought drives away another; old facts are chased by new ones..."
2/ Clear thought has been replaced by vague feeling...
Ellul: "Modern man does not think about current problems; he feels them. He reacts, but be does not understand them any more than he takes responsibility for them."
Issac Newton was an alchemist. Alan Turing thought telepathy is real. It's undeniable at this point that people at the upper bounds of intelligence are quasi-mystics. A material universe made of inert atoms is for midwits only
William James was a parapsychology researcher
Wolfgang Pauli, who Einstein called his "spiritual heir," thought he could break lab equipment from a different city
Past geniuses did not, infact, "trust the experts"
Jack Parsons invented the first rocket engine...while being a member of an occult group founded by magician Crowley
Arthur Conan Doyle created fiction's most logical man, Sherlock Holmes...while trying to contact spirits in his private life