Personality Lecture #21

Study Notes
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Discussion thread for Personality and Its Transformations - Lecture #21

study group discussion

Discussion as part of our Study Group.

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my notes

  • 0:00 - Performance

    • Creative/Entrepreneurial Achievement

    • Academic Achievement

    • Workplace Success

  • 4:00 - Why not position yourself for success rather than for failure?

  • 6:00 - 65% of managers add zero or negative effect to companies

    • They can wipe out the careers of all they are supervising, and if they are higher up, they can bring the entire company down

    • USA is required by law to use the most effective means of hiring for talent in a non discriminatory way

      • Data seems to show that unstructured interviews are discriminatory - optimise for charming people, which isn’t job performance

      • Conscientiousness is the best measurement for managerial success - they should use this

        • Combined with intelligence measurements, you get an even better measurement

      • Even with better bad measurements, it is huge economic potential - as the performance of competent vs incompetent people is vastly different

    • Measuring management performance is a difficult problem

      • You want multiple measurements, in case some of them are wrong

      • Profit isn’t productivity, but over enough tests in a specific field where it matters, they are good enough

  • 09:00 - odds prediction

  • 18:00 - selling things of obvious economic value, is still very hard - the less accurate tests are easier to sell - myers-briggs has zero predictive ability of performance, but it doesn’t hurt anyone’s feelings - the problem with tests, is most people who do it, don’t do well, and most people are terrible at statistics, and most people are tribalistic to their department, caring about its success over others - and most people have zero decision making power, but are happy to talk to you nonetheless

    • How much does it cost? Well it doesn’t matter if the cost to benefit ratio is higher in benefit - benefit being profit

    • Most people stay in a position for 4 years, before moving up, laterally, or down, or out

    • Small companies move fast, but have no money

    • 92% of your labour goes to sales/marketing/distribution

    • Entrepreneurs can make products, but they don’t know how to market it, and usually don’t know which product to make (that people will actually buy)

    • As soon as I have time is never

    • People do not care about whether they will succeed, they care about whether they will fail - people’s fundamental motivation: invisible and left alone

      • This will prevent you from being identified as a failure - is more successful marketing strategy than - this will help you succeed

      • Zebra story is everything you need to know about human beings - zebras have stripes for camouflage, they are not camouflaged to be indistinguishable from the environment, but indistinguishable from each other

        • << is this true for caucasian perception of asians, as having them all look the same, makes it easier to discriminate against the group versus the individual, assisting group selection? >>

        • Things generally evolve for multiple reasons

        • Hunting animals are smart - but still, hunters must hunt an individual, rather than the herd

        • The rule for human beings are, keep your damn stripes on, so the lions don’t get you - protective of the individuals, and the group! - as a lion that cannot identify and kill an individual, keeps the tribe strong

          • << importance of socialisation for children, to not be hunted, and not to become a lion - and this is criticised as everyone seems the same! Ha! That I want to be an individual! Ha! No, you don’t want to be an individual and alone, you want your protective subgroup to be an individual >>

          • People aren’t after happiness, they are after not hurting

            • << then what is depression? As those who are in it, seem to optimise for pain >>

            • << somehow Peterson links staying in the herd with stability of low neuroticism, but that seems counterintuitive - as those who are high in neuroticism are motivated by safe spaces - but perhaps those high in neuroticism are more likely to be instable and stand out - perhaps low in neuroticism people fit in from the efforts of those high in neuroticism (the sentries) >>

  • 35:00 - Slide - Price’s Law

  • 39:00 - << Peterson should just market his tests to individuals not companies, as individuals move fast and want to avoid debt - whereas companies have the issues he already outlined - perhaps this has been technically constrained by poor technical assistance (need better devs, designers, UX people, growth hackers, etc) >>

  • 42:00 - it’s way easier to make someone stupider than smarter, it is way easier to make something worse than better - seems nutrition and internet is the equaliser, besides that, not so much - which then maximises the genetic variability because the social variability has been eliminated

  • 44:00 - the Pareto distribution - creative output/achievement - matthew principle

    • Normal distribution - IQ, openness, conscientiousness

  • 47:00 - the problems of zero

    • 54:00 - you can do great, then one bad thing can knock your advantage out, making your equals now farther ahead, and more farther with each moment

      • << perhaps this is is solved when economic markets collapse - new markets open, old ones close, new people are grown, old ones die, etc >>

  • 59:00 - I’m going to make a decision that I’m not going to get in trouble for - social proof, authority, credibility

  • 1:05:00 - slide - predictors of performance

  • 1:08:00 - you need a positive goal - as otherwise activities are meaningless with no positive reinforcement

    • If you keep yourself vague and foggy, you keep yourself blind to your failures, which means you ignore the small failures until the big one takes you out

    • 1:13:00 - setup your schedule as the optimal day you want - so you want to do it everyday! - each day should leave you better - about 20% of obligations

      • What are you going to do with your success, that will make the work to accomplish it, worth it

        • You are not your own servant, you need to be someone you respect negotiating with

          • For a successful negotiation, no one is allowed to walk away resentful and angry - if you do, then it means you have something to say