[POLL] LessWrong group on YourMorals.org (2015)

I suppose I'd be willing to say that those are "facets" of a single property if presented with evidence that they correlated really rightly with each other, but, no, I wouldn't a-priori consider, say, sensation seeking and intellectual open mindedness to be different facets of the same quality.

I think we may have a confusion of terminology here. The Big Five is the result of a statistical procedure which boils down thousands of peoples' responses to thousands of questions (based on personality words) into a set of 5 statistical abstractions which are as non-redundant and predict as many responses on average as possible; why 5? Well, 5 abstractions were chosen because if you boil it down further to 4/3/2/1, what's left doesn't seem particularly meaningful (there may be a 1 'J' healthy-personality factor akin to intelligence's G factor, but last I saw it mentioned it was still highly doubtful), and more than 5 would be harder to use since 5 is a nice easily-handled number which seems to map pretty well onto gross aspects of personalities & can be easily measured in a short questionnaire.

However, there is no reason you could not have a factorization instead as a Less-Big 6 (something like HEXACO) or a Even-Less-Big 7 or some larger number. And specifically, each of the Big 5 are themselves the correlation of 6 more specific factors or 'facets' for a total of 30 factors available (assuming you used the longer Big 5 tests which allow reasonably accurate per-facet measurements instead of lumping them together and only giving you say Openness); for example, Openness is extracted from the facets/factors dubbed "Fantasy", "Aesthetics", "Feelings", "Actions", "Ideas", & "Values". You might not consider the "Ideas" facet (whatever that is) to have anything to do with the "Fantasy" facet, but apparently they do correlate in the real-world samples of people taking the long more in-depth personality surveys which were used to construct the Big 5.

Often all you need are the top-level factors and so the details of how many factors doesn't matter, but sometimes it is important to go down to the more fine-grained factors and make use of the 30 facets. For example, males/females do not show up as very different on Big 5 inventories, despite the universal belief that men & women have very different personalities; but this is because the male/female difference is on the facets and that gets hidden when it's boiled down to the 5: "The Distance Between Mars and Venus: Measuring Global Sex Differences in Personality".

And the facets themselves can be factorized even more narrowly if one wants. (The most extreme example I've seen was a paper I can't seem to refind at the moment, but where they had hundreds of people fill out thousands of test items online and with this huge bulk of data, they extracted what they called the Tiny 100 or the Little 100 or something like that.)

but I wouldn't predict those two qualities to be particularly more correlated than say, Extroversion and Openness.

I think your prediction would just be wrong. Interest in new ideas does seem to correlate with sensation-seeking (I'd guess those are the Openness facets "Ideas" and "Action", respectively) and that's why they help give rise to the Openness factor.

Conformity and kindness aren't two facets of the same diamond

I'd agree on that one. Conformity I would expect to fall under Conscientiousness ("Order"?) and kindness is definitely under Agreeableness ("Altruism"). Hence conformism and kindness are going to be mostly independent traits.

I suppose I'd be willing to say that those are "facets" of a single property if presented with evidence that they correlated really rightly with each other, but, no, I wouldn't a-priori consider, say, sensation seeking and intellectual open mindedness to be different facets of the same quality.

The big five aren't a-priori categories. They are supposed to be factors that come out of principle component analysis.

From my, admittedly limited, knowledge of non-Western cultures, I get the impression that the fairness norm is very much a Western Civilization thing.

My bad. I wanted to say universalist.

Yes. And you can go two ways from there. Either you can try to eliminate them, but then you meet the issue that for most folks it is incredibly difficult to make a difference between policy and values as both are approached from an "I cheer for X" angle. If succesful, you end up with a society that does not have a culture. From this viewpoint I feel for the conservative case. It is very, very weird to try to build a society without culture, it is as if it was not meant for human brains. And it would be very good if people could see a clear difference between policy and culture but again it is very, very hard, it goes against many instincts.

I am basically a product of that. My parents were always the kinds of secular Euroliberals who don't really believe in many values, and for this reason I alway found it hard to find goals in life: there was nothing they were passionate or judgemental about, so I find it to be passionate about anything. From this kind of upbringing it is just hard to think anything matters as everything was taught as a mere preference, hobby, interest...

The opposite solution is to try to break up into an archipelago, where sub-societies, sub-cultures are forming their own rules. This sounds a bit sci-fi but look at it this way. The Roman Empire was largely monolithical. The Dark Ages afterwards an archipelago. Charlemagne's empire monolithical, then the German-Italian city-states and small kingdoms again an archipelago. It sounds a bit like it ebbs and flows.

Well, generally I think "abstract and generic" is the obvious way to go, and I think is usually the done thing - I think the very US-specific tests on yourmorals are from studies that were originally only done in the US and are as abstract and generic as they needed to be in that context. The possibility that tending not to understand abstract, generic questions is a culture-dependent trait seems like a really tricky problem, although in some contexts you might just compromise with e.g. "you pastor, or if you are not religious then someone you trust similarly, tells you..."