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Episode 50: What's your personality
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all right dr. Lyle how are you doing today good good about yourself doing pretty good you know it's been actually being cold here in Southern California but apparently the rest of the world that's normal weather that all right we're glad to hear it glad here you excited over yeah we're a little bit a little soft around the edges here in Southern California I think it's like isn't it everyone's you know I'm certainly some cold I just ended it but but the East Coasters don't have a problem yeah all right what do you got going today well today we need the collar on hold actually so we're going to as any listening if you ever comment College will take up the topic of today's chefs how to assess your own personality and we are going to take call first and step it were over the DF 10 or the 10 I've in personality index right after my question so you we cannot have this in our kind of assess your own personality name dr. Lao you can tell them a significance beach behind these question they came up with these these answers just jump yeah it's very good I'm having a little trouble trouble hearing you I hope it's just me but we'll do the best we can okay can hear now oh it's a little bit better it's still breaking up okay give me what I can I'm gonna put our caller on hold on on the line yes okay well how come you - are you doing okay I can't hear anybody can hear me I'm dr. Krieger I can hear somebody there okay here you guys okay you're on Google on it from glob yeah we've got cooter real problems Nate just licked in okay I think I'm not sure if I have problems anybody having trouble hearing me your comments are loud and clear okay very good and and what's your name sir there's Tom Tom very good okay I think that I can hear you and I think our trouble we're having is just with Nate's connection so I go ahead and if you had a question for us we'll go ahead and try to answer that okay it's not related to the ten personality questions so don't worry we'll be on topic are going to be anything okay well you know AB mentions sort of go ahead I was going my question is uh you know as far as finding happiness it sounds like your strategies you know between a pair bonding and a tournament species it's mostly pair bond dominance with that chippie chippie strategy you're talking about what is that I mean is there another strategy that's more tournament style term species style which is kind of like when you see with some of these particular artists communities and things like that yeah okay here's what here's what we're trying to accomplish and obviously everybody has to walk their own Road dependent upon their own personalities and so it's going to turn out to be the case that that the typical member of our species has a pretty strong predilection towards what we would call intermediate term monogamy in other words they have a thing that we call love love is a that that's a word that we use for several different types of of experiences and including loving a tuna salad sandwich but when we're talking about romance which is in implies sexuality with people and we're talking about a particular kind of of a relationship where where sex is a major component of the relationship between people it's not the only major issue that's going on there but it's a very important component and it's going to turn out that for for evolutionary reasons that is pretty emotionally significant for people in the sense that that they don't tend to have the following attitude they they tend to have a possessive attitude towards their partner sexuality and they have emotions to come natural to the species the sexual jealousy is a is a natural fall out of a pattern of desiring exclusivity that its characteristic of humans now so it's going to turn out that when you when you pry open the heads of humans it doesn't doesn't take us doesn't take too long to find out that what they would really like would they would like a deep connection with one individual and for that one individual to satisfy all kinds of needs that they have be their best friend be their exclusive sexual partner and particularly in in principle they would generally like their mate to certainly be exclusive with them whether or not they would be exclusive with their mate is of course a matter of their own sort of individual predilection and debate now so it's going to turn out that that that desire for that type of relationship and its ability to satisfy it is not that easy because it's going to turn out that that human beings are going to be pretty tough negotiators and so they're going to be difficult to satisfy in those in those domains and in with those kinds of relationships however some people might say you know truth is is that that I have I have a great deal of openness to experience and even though I desire and I have those feelings I've got some essentially pair-bond circuits inside my head I've got some other pretty powerful novelty and variety seeking circuits as well which would be normal human variation to have those things and so there is a there's going to be a people that are going to feel like there's a different way to operate this life and this life you've got trade-offs and you only have so much time and energy so your job is to use the time and energy you have in pursuit of goals that that will cause you to have interactions between you and the world mostly the social world that will potentially optimize your life experience that's the that's the game that is on the chess board that each of us confronts the some people will look at this chess board and they will say you know what I don't think an exclusive romantic deep connection is the optimum strategy for me and so there's been people that that clouded that I just said I'm not going to do it Hugh Hefner in principle would be one such individual now it's interesting that at various times in his life he found himself in love with some girl and married so I think he married several times and then this is a guy that is very open to experience and there is also attractive guy with tremendous amount of resources and sitting in a location where he could give a lot of young highly attractive females a lot of status and so as a result of that he he had access to an awful you know basically an endless high variety parade of extremely attractive women and so it was difficult for him to to actually sustain his his desires on that score for very long and so his romances would last for a few years then he'd be back back in the in the in the casual mating game again and so but that's an example of the two different strategies located inside of one head and how circumstances of the environment we sort of flowed him back and forth between those two different strategies never quite settling into one strategy for good which shows you that those two things can be you know pretty competitive strategies so on this show one of the things that I'm not doing is I'm not attempting to try to coach any individuals and to figuring out how to optimize their success within a casual mating strategy general life strategy in other words it's it's a perfectly legitimate pursuit in other words I don't see I have no in principle objection to anybody doing this I don't think that that it's the wrong thing to do it's just it turns out it's probably not the optimal strategy for most people most human beings are not as naturally open to experience as a Hugh Hefner and so even though they may have a great I'm speaking and men in particular but they may have a lot of sexual impulses across a wide variety of females etc and they could really see themselves operating just fine in that paradigm the truth is is that the majority of men are not that open to experience and actually are desirous of a have a sort of more committed relationship at least intermittently in other words three years five years at a time etc does this make sense yep that's great okay is that all yeah this is all yeah I have no just to reiterate no objection at all towards casual mating pursuit and the cost benefit for every individual is going to be you know very much different I can remember I think Dustin Hoffman said you know thank God I I wasn't as practice Tom Cruise because if I were you know I'd just be chasing these women all over town I never would have accomplished anything the so you know he's just sort of looking at his life realizing he didn't have that and understanding how tempting that would be but as we see in a Tom Cruise we saw him go through this life with essentially as a serial monogamist where he his relationships would last about five years at a time or so and which is about probably very consistent with the with the the basically stock pair-bonding machinery that resides inside of human beings and so we see somebody that that essentially has infinite choice and yet and he could have played this game literally one casual mating strategy relationship up to the next different one every week and he could have done that but he didn't and he didn't because he would find himself you know in this very interesting place that humans can get to because we are a pair of odd potential species where there are more deep and and impactful moods of happiness in a in a deep romance then can take place in casual Medic strategy the reasons why this is true psychologically why there are different and deeper emotions has to do with esteem dynamics and that is that if you are in a causal mating situation you are you are superficially qualifying for intelligence and personality and you are absolutely qualifying in terms of the lust features of your physical form and so as a result of that you know if you are a male and have attractive females that are responding to that that's pretty cool in other words you're able to get to the female sexual Treasury with a minimum amount of investment and males that can do that you know will often do that and it will often have quite a career but then very often even males that are extremely successful in that regard will trip over a female that the relationship between em has the potential for for there to be an esteem dynamic between the two of them that is much more profound and that's what we call love and and that's a different experience and it literally is different neural circuits and it's it's literally like saying the difference between found and taste in other words they're two very different experiences and in the context of a romantic love relationship you can get to have both at the same time instead of one and that's the multi-dimensional nature of human romance is what lures men in and willing to trade away that freedom as enticing as it might be alright that's answer your questions or Jim that's good all right a listen thank you very much for calling Tom thank you very much for the call dr. Lyle can you hear me now yeah I can hear you great I'll clarify okay good sorry for that I'm talking great question thank you for calling in and I don't know if I broke up the very beginning but regardless of our stated topic on the podcast callers will always take priority and so if you guys ever have questions just call on call in and we'll we'll take you first and then go on with the topic hmm very cool all right Tom thank you very much for the call really appreciate it okay so today's show it's about assessing our own personality and on the comments section are that the description I put on there a link to the University of Texas the the PDF file for the looking at the 10 item personality inventory index so I just figured we will go over it today and you can kind of coach us in the ins and outs and why things are significant and what what how we can assess our own personality well did you send me that link Nate did I show you the linkage I just figured you were in front of everything dr. well right I don't need to see it but it'd be good for me to know what they're looking at but that's fine I know I know what yeah I thought it was it's okay it's no big deal yeah I know worry we can yeah hmm I'm not sure I may probably if it is it the BF 10 yes the BST yes okay I've looked at the BF 10 a few years ago and I can't remember what they were the questions are but it doesn't really matter it's a it's an amazingly simple device so just to just to give people a little appreciation for this this this tiny little 10 question inventory is going to be better than any other device not using this underlying theory that you're going to take so people are wasting their time with the myers-briggs which is a joke the and yet that's by far the most used personality inventory you know in American industry and probably in a lot of other places as well this is BF 1010 little tiny questions can be remarkably good even even with such a cursory examination and the reason for that is it is assessing it's going right to what we consider to be five of the six major latent variables that are involved in the nature of human personality so let's just take a little quick review about what is that we mean by this and what I mean by a latent variable the what this is arrived at by a a concept and a technique known as factor analysis and so factor analysis is not is not a statistical technique that is used in in in the in the hard sciences so that you aren't going to see factor analysis and chemistry I don't believe or physics or anything like that you're going to see it in social science and the reason is is that we are we're looking for well human beings have a propensity to give 50 names for one idea and let me give you an example so an example would be intelligence so we might have the word smart we might have the word brilliant have the word genius moron stupid embassy etcetera and all of these things are met are essentially measures or descriptions of a quantitative variation in a single underlying latent variable that we're going to call intelligence so genius would be a whole lot of intelligence imbecile a very small amount and so what so what these what they did in order to arrive at this was they actually investigators looked at thousands and thousands of words that human beings use to describe each other so it turns out an English language about somewhere near or third of the words that human beings and know are have to do with these descriptions and so these are the adjectives that we look at each other and we have names for each other and we describe each other to each other using these words imbecile stupid genius intelligent bright dull you know moron idiot etc etc so and it's going to turn out that when you put all those names in a in a computer so if you have someone describe all kinds of of their peers etc it's going to turn out that that you that you can essentially distill down you don't have to ask somebody about whether someone is both bright whether they're intelligent whether they're an imbecile whether they're more on whether they're stupid and said or you just have to ask them one thing and which is how intelligent do you think they are and that settles the issue and so this is so this is going to be what we call the latent variable or the latent factor that sits under thousands of adjectives and it's going to turn out I think there's about 3,000 adjectives in the English language that are commonly used for one central idea which is intelligence so there's going to be five more of these central ideas that have been found and they are openness to experience here's here's another example of that adventurous staid you know conventional wild these are all different these are all sort of dictating different places along a line of the line that we're going to call openness to experience the it's going to turn out that each of these variables isn't just on sort of a line that goes from low to high it turns out that if we measure the population and how people describe say a thousand people it's going to turn out that it falls in a bell curve which is just a thing of beauty and when something falls in a bell curve it's a it's a telltale sign that biology is at work so with intelligence it's very clear from from multitudes of evidence that intelligence is overwhelmingly a genetic and origin and so it's no surprise that intelligence test scores fallen bell curves the same thing is going to be true of the five latent variables that make up the human personality that we're going to call the big five and so this test is ten simple questions - questions apiece which give us two shots at estimating you or anybody else you know on the big five and so there's two questions there that are going to relate to openness two questions are going to relate to the concept of conscientiousness two questions are going to relate to introversion extroversion two questions will relate to how agreeable you are and two questions will relate to how emotionally stable or neurotic you are so so all you need to do is I think that I think that test has you sort of agree strongly or disagree strongly and then agree or etc so I think it's on essentially is it a five-point scale basically the one I'm looking at the link I provided for the listeners unfortunately not you again apologies for that yeah is a is a seven-point scale so it's disagree strongly disagree moderately disagree a little neutral agree a little agree moderately agree strongly so that's where that's called the seven-point you know seven point Likert scale or modified Likert scale I can't remember but anyway this is just a standard scaling mechanism in the social sciences to to give people latitude about how much they want to agree with something and so then we can turn those into numbers so we would go minus 3 on one side then minus 2 then minus 1 then 0 then 1 2 3 and in this way by assigning numbers to the responses that people give we can statistically analyze this in fact they may even have you score it that way is that how they do it yeah you know what now that you're explaining I never really I do take an advanced stats class and I think you taught a stats class at Stanford right sure yeah so so I never knew how to score this but now now you're telling me yeah on the bottom it says here's how to score it and it says number 1 and then 6 are so I guess you know this one should be reversed and then that one yes right I tell you which ones to reverse and which ones not to refers right they're going to reverse those questions so that you don't have a response bias because some people just say extremely agree to everything and so they're kind of shake that out of the equation and by balancing the questions so we're going to find out that my guess is they just go right down the big five so what's the very first item read that for me the first item is extroverted enthusiastic and so this starts as I see myself as extroverted enthusiastic okay and so you either agree or disagree with that yeah what's just kind of not that sure why not sorry so I'm going to actually quietly score you ah ah fun and we're going to tell you whether an independent observer like agrees with your own self analysis so this is on extroverted and gastic and I'm going to put you I know where I'm going to put you okay I'm going to put you right there okay and then maybe I'll go ahead Joe and then and then oh you want me to say it out loud or should I not say it and then we see no go to the neck model where yeah yeah okay then I want to use what do you score them on that one I'm extroverted enthusiastic let's see what else are they on I want to wait till we do the second item on okay on that one I won't say okay okay the second item is critical and quarrelsome okay that would be essential probably argumentative or aggrievement okay right okay okay and when you see let me just put money in that one so you score yourself on that one okay hold on a second let's see okay so okay go ahead versus our number one is disagree strongly number two is just agree moderately and then the Polaski are agreeing little yeah okay Denver twos critical and quarrelsome number three dependable and self-disciplined dependable filled discipline okay um got it all right okay got it okay number four is anxious and easily upset okay yeah because I'm looking at this something man Here I am on our podcast you know I can sense myself thinking well I want to bless a little bit more you know a little better than I actually am people have this pair this is this sentence with a truth about you we have people not people will get your truth and then they'll get my truth ha all right go ahead but just good but does this survey like kids you know when people take it on their own it might be a little different than if say other people are listening but we're going to get to see that all right yeah go ahead okay okay so anxious and easily upset we did this one is open to new experiences and complex without okay got it alright let's see okay okay got it okay number six is reserved and quiet okay got it hold on a second okay I got it and number seven is sympathetic and warm interesting okay go ahead number eight is disorganized and careless so I got a question about some of these when I go through all these I think you know yeah there's times when I'm when I'm such and such you know adjective and sometimes when I'm not so that's right eleven are four is that you just have to pick one right right I would say there okay well that let me think a little bit let me think a little bit disorganized and careless okay and the ninth one is calm and emotionally stable okay and then the tenth one the last one is conventional and uncreated okay I've got you all right all right so so the so here's an interesting thing it's like when even say like the calm emotionally stable one sometimes I'm like you know I feel calm on the outside but I'm just like certainly in my head I'm like on you know upset at the guy sitting at the traffic light not going on green light and it doesn't feel like I'm very stable so right what's that yeah what this is is that all we're measuring here is adjectives which describe you relative to other people okay so these are these are all comparative they don't mean anything unless we're comparing them to some kind of baseline and the baseline that we are using is the average person that you know in the world so if it turns out that let's suppose you're you're you know a software engineer and you work with run a bunch of nerds and many of them have even had you know I don't know bazooka bubblegum you know and so it's like wow you're the one that that one day you know an old girlfriends that you had once smoked cigarette once that that puts you out over the edge then you might be thinking that you're more adventurous than you are in the world because your base your baseline is skewed relative to reality so because I have basically God's eye view of human nature I know exactly where to score you [Laughter] so it's interesting because on a number of these I of course as you should find yourself ambivalent you know about one point one direction or the other now I didn't have any ambivalence about say two points in other words so I would I will be kind of entertained where you and I disagree by as much as two points on any recourse okay all right I'll go ahead and start with the extraversion and you tell me where you put it okay so wait so extraversion is one and six are so number one I put myself at six agree moderately okay so Nate you put yourself there I put yourself up at essentially a five so we have a 1 a 1 disagreement which is good ok ok so notice how this is how good this is for people out there because on a seven-point scale a typical disagreement would be 3 ok in principle if it was random so the fact that you and I are within one tells you that I know something about you you know this is likely to be a non-random effect ok all right go to the next one which is on degree about dimension by the way I wonder I wanted to share with the listeners so after so you have a really great video on your website called the perfect personality and then the romantic Casanova that I am I used to I used to when I used to date girl when I used to know when I had girls after watch this video I'd have them come over we watched the video together and then we'd like score each other on the on the personality characteristics and that was like a romantic date screen now I have to redo some of my scores then if that's what happened ok so he was all right in Berea he would score each other yeah ok so yeah hot topic here ok number six is the other one but we had our agreeable the first the second question Oh second question I scored myself as number two is critical and oh ok well I'm not sure if I'm lost or you're lost I'm going to assume that I'm still connected and I'm going to just keep talking so I'm here wait for Nate to come back on the four so for those of you that could be scorekeeping they've on the agreeable dimension I'm going to my belief is is that my perception is that he's at a plus one so he is hmm everything about this that it would be agreeable yeah he saw I'll put him on plus one there I think that's about right it's close between that and zero relative the population in other words he's pretty close to the middle of the population but maybe I'll put them at +1 the island attend I your back okay so what do you put on your agreeable sort of the number to critical and quarrelsome I put yeah we put agree moderately for being critical in quarrelsome okay so that's interesting moderately which is not mildly right so that's uh yeah it's number six out of seven okay now that's interesting so you and I actually have a fairly large dispute there and I'll tell I can tell the listeners why the I actively push you clear over wait a second listen you said well so that what's it called it's called critical and quash I didn't gave a quarrelsome okay so you put yourself over here that six I put you at five okay okay so wonder again or we have a one A one difference okay that's good so we are right in range all right so now we go to the next one which is described that dependable yeah dependable and self-disciplined is a seven all the way to the to the far extremely dependable and etc yeah yeah yeah I put my going to like out sometimes on people but but it's just kinda rare so right I put I put you at 6:00 okay which is because sometimes your audio connections really are not that good you should have done something about it alright so i wish i yeah that my blood pressure when that happened you'd probably hold it would be telling me to come up fast alright so that's good so once again we are within one score alright so then the next one is what anxious upset anxious upset and I put my stuff there as a - meaning I just had a moderately write and I put you as a as a disagree mildly so once again we're finding a kind of an interesting pattern here and the pattern is that I score you a one closer to the middle than you do so in every case I believe that's what's happened and we're going to see if that matter continues which wouldn't necessarily surprise us because this is actually a function of response bias a different individual how they use the scale okay okay so okay now we're going to go to openness which is the next question yeah now that you say that I put a seven but I'm assuming you put a six or maybe even I did that's exactly what happened okay so we've now five times in a row we have seen that you and I see things in the same you know direction but you score yourself more extreme okay but all I'm wondering if this is like so the bias where where my brain is or my stone-age brain is kind of displaying like oh it's nice to be open the experience I'll be a little bit more than I actually am or oh it's nice to be less anxious and less easily upset you know I mean so it's a display no okay no I think it's actually it's probably more you see this you see this tendency to be the case is just simply did people use the scales differently so okay when you look at social science survey data you'll find whole hosts of people in a survey let's say a one to ten scale will never use a 1 or a 1 or a 2 and they'll never use a 9 or a 10 they'll score everything between 3 & 8 okay other people will use the whole scale so okay that uh I'm starting to see that possibility I think that's a personality difference between you and I all right you're preserved and quiet we're just I made that of 5 X 5 I agree a little ok so let me think about this so a read that thing for me reserved and quiet and I put my sword we edit and um yeah so you put yourself over at 5 I put you at minus 1 I excuse me out of what would have been it starts at 0 how does that work we're going to starts a 1 right 1 2 3 4 5 ok I put you at 3 so that's the only one so I see you as a little bit out gun you see yourself as slightly introverted this is a correct yeah and yeah I mean I note it uh go ahead so notice now go back to question one read question one again extroverted and enthusiastic so that's not okay and you're right and you put yourself up at six on my dream yeah exactly so I was struggling with that one because a lot of the hobbies that I enjoy are where I'm quiet and there's a lot of noise going on but I enjoy being around people right so that's why that's why I put you in like one people number and you of course you of course messed up your own test but that's okay this is this is actually interestingly enough this is an example so these were the two measurements of the introversion extroverted dimension and so on when you put yourself as you know two points above the middle for extroverted and on this one you put your soap one point below so on average that would put you it very slightly or half a point above the midline and actually have you I actually have you at exactly I have you at one point above no I have you it actually exactly at the midline between my two scores so I'm very close I'll we're very close so we we actually have you essentially right at the middle of the graph so we were in close agreement alright so the next one is going to be sympathetic and warm yes okay and and I put that one as as the plus three so agree strongly it might just room myself up here I six seven so you had yourself agree strongly plus three right I actually had you at zero excuse me at one two three four so I had you at four so you have yourself seeing yourself is much more agreeable than ICU which is interesting well we'll see what the next one brings because we got two shots at it alright or so the next one is disagreeable you know as more times right disorganized and careless now that one is natural so that one's right in the middle so you put yourself in the middle there but I put you at a two okay so now we're going to go back and we're going to look at the other angle of that which is going to be I guess we we don't have this disorganized this is going to be conscientiousness and that conscientiousness is going to be let's see critical row it's going to be dependable so it's the third question so the third question and this question are actually attempting to measure the same thing so you measure yourself as plus three over there and you measured yourself we're on this one right in the middle right in the middle okay so that would give you a plus one and a half on average plus one and a half for Nate I have you on I have you at essentially two points above the midline on the disorganized one in other words I have that that I have you two points and up there so I have you at a plus two okay so I score you as slightly more conscientious than you score yourself hmm no way to add you yeah I think that's correct so yeah pretty close alright so now we're going to look at the next one which is the calm calm and stable it's stable yep so that one I scored myself as I agree moderately so basically plus two from the midline one two three four five six seven okay so you have plus two in the midline you had yourself you disagreed with it by minus 2 on the up below the midline on the anxious upset one on question four so that means you see yourself as pretty calm well above average I saw you as a century a one two three on the first question and I saw you in the middle on this one so I actually have you a plus 0.5 so slightly above average so I actually see you is more volatile than you see yourself so you see yourself as a cooler head that I think you are yeah well your ally right though me my mom are kind of the same we get into some some pretty escalated feud sometimes just uh yeah and I determined to you because we're both slightly bashed or understood yeah there you go so I actually said that's actually our biggest disagreement so far Bertha and again though we see an example of you scoring yourself in a more extreme dimension away from the midline that I would so the disagreement may not be as much as as our intuitions would be looking at this if we're looking at it okay and so then the last one is conventional the uncreated and where did you score that I put myself as a 3 so disagree a little on to 302 - allied - one away from the midline right I put you at 2 so I put you at 2 points below the midline and that was let's see where I put you with respect to let me see what would have been the other side of this for openness so I put you at +2 and above the midline on openness on question 1 2 3 4 5 and then I put you it at -2 below the midline on this so on line is consistent I see you as quite open and you put yourself let's see on the openness you put yourself clear over at 7 on the first time around and then you put yourself where on this one conventional one were creative I put my Scioscia disagree a little one below the midline correct so you get so therefore 3ms is a so plus three minus one is plus to an average of plus one okay so I actually see you as a little yet wait a second you you're one plus three square no we actually agree completely we we have you averaged out at two above the midline and it's quite creative so we actually agree very much very close and this is how so this is interesting for our listeners because we totally scored these independently and I'm completely ruthless in other words I'm going to put exactly what I think and that's true we have based on our phone corrections that's true listeners ha ha the and this is this is what it looks like and so yeah if we disagree anywhere I think you're you're a little more emotionally volatile than I I think you're a little more volatile than than you think you are however part of this is also due to some differences that that I might be looking at what I think is you know it depends on what one thinks or what one intuition about what these different with scores would look like on a bell curve so I actually think you're fairly you're fairly reasonably volatile and passionate I think that that two other factors come in and reduce the volatility they're sort of independently so it's not seen but it's felt which is your intelligence and your conscientiousness so someone could be pretty pretty emotionally volatile but they could have enough conscientious and intelligence that they consistently overwrite it enough that you don't see it that much but it's there and that that's what I see in you I actually I don't think you're quite as calm as you think you are so anyway valid email dit on the head that's that that's that seems just about right actually yeah there you go so anyway that's the that's the story of the big five and if we add an IQ estimate which you can anybody can do that trivially all you have to do is ask yourself you know how hard was high school and and then how hard was the hardest classes in high school and where did I stack up relative to the smartest kids in the school etc you can pretty well put yourself easily in at least decile demarcations top 10% top 20% top 30% etc down the line that's pretty easy to do the I had an interesting conversation just to get outside of personality and wander over to intelligence just for a second because people are remarkably touchy and fascinatingly quietly leadest and have a lot of strange thinking about intelligence and they they this is propensity of human beings to ceaselessly seek order and dominance hierarchies so everybody wants to know who the greatest basketball player was well not just now but also of all time and bla bla bla and they want to know who the greatest this was and that was we want to have somebody at the top of which there is no dispute this really cannot be done really with respect to any human ability whether we're talking about Leonardo da Vinci painting or sculpting versus other people etc and it's sure as heck there's no way to do this with mathematics physics chemistry psychology sociology anthropology religion or anything else into the Sun the and you sure as heck can't do it with intelligence intelligence is a is a capacity of human beings to solve diverse problems that require require computations of various kinds including how well it is that you could paint including how well it is that you could put a basketball through the hoop and it also includes the ability to do differential and integral calculus in other words all kinds of things and it's going to turn out that when we measure all those kinds of things these these abilities have a tendency to hang together but they don't hang together that well so I don't think that Albert Einstein was much of an orator okay just his brain wasn't connected up to his mouth that well and he probably didn't have that big of oh cab you Larry so nothing like a poet that's getting a master's degree from swathmore for example so so intelligence needs to be thought of as sort of like beauty it has all kinds of different mentions to it and there are people that are extremely beautiful and there are people that are extremely intelligent but even the people that are extremely beautiful you could say well but you know if only his is he was had a little bit more of a tan or whether his hair was a little darker or his shoulders were an inch broader then he'd be just a little bit better and so oh and so-and-so has better shoulders or so and so that girl has better bust than that one so even though that one's more quote beautiful in the face there's this on that that's exactly what intelligence is it's a multi-dimensional system that we can't accurately put it in a dominance hierarchy any more than you can effectively put beauty in the hierarchy sort of can but ultimately when it gets down to fine gradations you can't so we throw that variable into the mix along with these things that we call the big five and you pretty much have a profile for who it is that you are and who anybody else is and this can be useful in all kinds of contexts if nothing else for your sheer entertainment as you can see the patterns of your life you know in front of you and you can think back on the stupid and brilliant things that you've done socially and otherwise and you can see see the track marks in the snow of where it is that those behaviors came from that's all in our in our genes and our nervous system nothing we heard about it you can you know sometimes people this is a closing statement sometimes people will be frustrated when they hear this argument and they'll think can't you change well yes you can change but you're not going to change your personality but you can change aspects of your life quite substantially so the truth is is that the human being and other animals has the capacity to learn and therefore alter their understanding of the adaptive landscape so the more you know about how the world works the more options and the more accurate you behavior becomes so for example you can be a thug when you're 18 years old and you walk into liquor stores and you hold them up and that's how it is that you you know get the the money that you need to buy your cocaine okay you can end up figuring out 15 years later that that wasn't such a good idea and that that after repeated prices on that on that process are so great that you sort of hang it up and you decide you know what maybe you'd be better off to just get a decent job and just work okay so did the personality change well the n8 circuits did not change but did the individual alter their understanding of the environment yeah they're at 18 years old their understanding of the environment was different they didn't compute the risk reward ratio very effectively and as a result of that they paid heavy prices until they eventually learned that that actually wasn't the optimal way to use their time and energy on earth and so you could say that they're quote personality changed but what what really changed in addition to obviously testosterone levels dropping but that's a different issue but what can actually change is the information base that's inside the system and therefore the situation's that they put themselves in and therefore the behavior changes you will see this very dramatically in quote shy people who are extremely shy among novel strangers but can be talkative just like little birds chirping like little birds among their best four or five friends or their family okay so if the context changes the individual's behavior can change substantially and so trying to find environments that are conducive to our personalities is one of the most important challenges and endeavors that we will do rather than try to change your personality try to find ecological social environments that are really good for you that's what it is that we want to use this blind pen test thank you dr. Lyle really appreciate analyzing the personality indexing clinically questions I will be happy to take them next week
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