When studying psychometrics, there is a common finding usually known as the “positive manifold” where basically all positive attributes tend to positively correlate with each other, at least at population levels. I.e. people who are fast at running or have more symmetric faces also tend to be smarter. And there being very few positive things that tend to be negatively correlated with each other, or things that seem clearly negative predictors of performance in one domain being positive predictors of performance in another domain.
I’ve been trying to understand the strength of this effect for a while, since I think it has really large effects on a lot of different psychology research, and I remember this post sticking in my mind as a relatively clear negative datapoint for the positive manifold, at least when you limit the population to be studied to an above-average IQ population. But I would also love to see more thinking going into this topic, and see some more eyes on this topic, so I am nominating it for the 2019 review.
When studying psychometrics, there is a common finding usually known as the “positive manifold” where basically all positive attributes tend to positively correlate with each other, at least at population levels. I.e. people who are fast at running or have more symmetric faces also tend to be smarter. And there being very few positive things that tend to be negatively correlated with each other, or things that seem clearly negative predictors of performance in one domain being positive predictors of performance in another domain.
I’ve been trying to understand the strength of this effect for a while, since I think it has really large effects on a lot of different psychology research, and I remember this post sticking in my mind as a relatively clear negative datapoint for the positive manifold, at least when you limit the population to be studied to an above-average IQ population. But I would also love to see more thinking going into this topic, and see some more eyes on this topic, so I am nominating it for the 2019 review.