TRANSCRIPT LECTURE 8

Openness to
Experience:
Intellect &
Openness
Lecture 8

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 TRANSCRIPT LECTURE 8

0:07
Alright. Well, lecture 8, openness to experience. It’s a factor that I have a particular interest in,
a trait that I have a particular interest in because I’ve done a lot of work studying creativity,
especially creative achievement.

0:25
There’s a difference between creativity and creative achievement. Creativity, let’s say
technically speaking from a measurement perspective, is the ability to generate a diverse range
of original but practical ideas, and so you can measure creativity using divergent thinking tests,
for example. One of them is, a good one is the Torrance Creativity Test, and what it asks you to
do, for example, is to write down in some limited span of time as many uses as you can think of
for a brick. A variant of that is to write down as many white, edible objects that you can think of.

1:05
You can score that in various ways. You can score absolute number of responses. You can
score proportional originality of response. So, let’s say you only have ten responses, but no one
else came up with those responses, so you get extra credit for that, and originality, fluency, oh
yes, and categorical diversity. These are harder to score, and they require multiple raters to get
any reasonable degree of convergence, but categorical diversity would be well, how many
different categories of response to the question were you able to generate.

1:39
They’re actually pretty highly correlated with trait openness, and they’re decent predictors of
long-term creative achievement. That’s where we specialized with a student of mine named

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Shelly Carson. We developed this instrument called the Creative Achievement Questionnaire,
which is now one of the most widely utilized measures of creative behavior, and our sense was
well, it isn’t enough to think creatively because you actually have to produce something as a
consequence of it for it to be genuine creativity. It deepens on how you define it.

2:13
There’s reasons to assess both the ideation process and the outcome process. So, I’ll talk to
you about the Creative Achievement Questionnaire as well when we go through this.

2:22
So, openness to experience has two aspects oddly named, in some sense, openness and
intellect. Openness ends up being named twice because it’s not easy to come up with a single
word that captures what openness is better than openness. So, openness and intellect are the
two aspects. Let’s go with intellect first.

2:49
Intellect is the personality reflection of intelligence. When someone seems smart, what you’re
doing is making a judgment. You don’t know want their intelligent quotient is, their IQ, which I’m
going to talk about in this lecture as well, but you have the sense that they seem smart. They
seem interested in ideas. They seem fluent with ideas, so that’s intellect, essentially.

3:12
Openness is more creative, imaginative, aesthetic. So, people who are interested in art and
literature and dance and the sort of creative end of the distribution. They’re also generally smart

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people. They might be high in intellect, but they have that additional appreciation for aesthetic
experience which seems to be part and parcel of their implicit constitution.

3:37
One of the things I would like to say right off the bat is just to dispense with this idea, you know
you hear this idea bandied around all the time in the popular media, and psychologists aid and
abet this to a substantial degree that everyone’s creative. That is absolutely wrong. It’s not the
case. First of all, creativity is relatively rare, and the bulk of the creative work is done by a very
tiny proportion of the people. It’s one of these Pareto distribution phenomena.

4:06
For example, how many of you have recorded an album? One, okay, two. Hey, that’s a lot for a
group this size. How many of you have painted more than three oil paintings? Oh, wow, that
figures. Well, you guys would be much higher in openness than the typical audience because
otherwise you wouldn’t be here listening to a lecture about ideas. So, I have a skewed sample
here.

4:31
You know how many paintings Picasso painted? You know how many works of art he created?
For those of you who are thinking happy thoughts about your three oil paintings, 65,000. Yes,
three a day every day for, what was it, three a day every day for I think that’s 60 years if I
remember correctly. I’m starting to get a bit fuzzy here, but anyways, it was 65,000.

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4:57
Bach wrote so much music, composed that is, so much music that if you were a professional
copyist, it would take you several decades of eight-hour days just to transcribe it, and only a tiny
proportion of Bach’s compositions are still played, so that’s another Pareto distribution
phenomena. I think it’s 50% of the classical repertoire is made from the composition of five
composers, only five, and 95% of what’s played of their work is drawn from only 5% of their
published corpus of compositions.

5:36
That’s another good example of how not only is it a small proportion of people who are
producing the greatest volume of productive work, but then you could even look at their volume
of work, and it’s only a tiny fraction of their total volume of work that’s doing most of the heavy
lifting. It’s Pareto distribution all the way down. Pareto distribution is a phenomena that occurs
where, as I said, it’s a tiny proportion of people end up doing most of the productive work.

6:06
The rule for the Pareto distribution is something like the square root of the number of people in a
given domain do half the work. So, it’s a very interesting distribution because it scales oddly.
We talked about that a little bit at the beginning of the discussion. If you have 10 employees, 3
of them do half the work. If you have 100, it’s 10. If you have 1,000, it’s 30. If you have 10,000,
it’s 100.

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6:30
I’ve watched big corporations die, and I think they die in large part because of the consequence
of the Pareto distribution. So, imagine this. Imagine you have a company with 10,000
employees. Let’s say 200 of them do half the work. We’ll be generous about it. The question is
which 200, and the answer is you probably don’t know, or you probably don’t want to know
because it’s not likely the people that you think it is, especially if your corporation’s failing
because you’re not really paying attention the way that you should be.

7:01
So, imagine this. You have a very large corporation, and a very tiny proportion of the people
are doing all the productive work. Then, you have a bad quarter. Then, you announce that
there’s going to be layoffs. Who’s the first to leave? Well, obviously it’s people who have a
stellar reputation, so if you don’t know who those productive people are, they know, and the
people around them know, and the probability that they’re going to be able to make a lateral
move or a move up to jump off your sinking ship is extraordinarily high.

7:34
So, the problem is that once it starts to sink, especially if you make the wrong decision, the
sinking is going to occur ever more rapidly. I think that’s part of the reason why Marx, in some
sense, was wrong because Karl Marx thought that capital would accrue in the hands of smaller
and smaller numbers of people, and he was right in that capital accumulation also follows a
Pareto distribution. I think the 12 richest people in the world have as much money as the
bottom 2 billion. It’s something like that.

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8:03
You know, you hear about the 1% all the time. By the way, you’re all in the 1%. You only need
a yearly income of $32,000 a year to be in the upper 1% for the world income distribution. You
might say well, that’s unfair because I only meant to calculate it within Canada, let’s say, or
within the United States, but I don’t really see why you get to pick the boundaries of your
category for 1% to suit your particular, say, ideological proclivity, but that’s all it takes is
$32,000.

8:33
Capital does is accrue in the hands of a relatively small proportion of people, just like in a
Monopoly game if you play it out until its end, but what Marx missed is there isn’t a lot of
intergenerational stability with regards to where the capital stays. So, there’s a relatively small
probability that you’re currently in the 1%, say by Canadian standards, but there’s a reasonable
probability that you will be in the 1% at some point for some period of time during your life. I
think it’s 10%. I think it’s something like 25% that you’ll be in the upper 5%.

9:07
So, even though the fact that a small percentage of the people have most of the capital, the
people who compose that 1% churn quite rapidly. You see that at the corporate level as well
because Fortune 500 companies have a lifespan of about 30 years.

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9:24
I think part of the reason why large companies collapse is actually a consequence of the Pareto
distribution that I just described. As your company grows, incompetence grows exponentially,
and competence grows linearly, which is really not a good thing.

9:38
One of the consequences of that is that things get so large that they fail, which is another
interesting thing to know about Pareto distributions because you remember during the financial
crisis, everybody said too big to fail, which is exactly the wrong thing to say because the right
thing to say is so big it will inevitably fail, and that’s something that I think is worth knowing at a
general level as well.

10:03
Things don’t necessarily scale. I mean, there’s an old rule if you want to build a large thing that
works, start by building a small thing that works and scale it, but there’s another rule which is
not everything scales.

10:18
Okay, so anyways, back to openness. Open people, this is the creative end, enjoy the beauty
of nature, believe in the importance of art, love to reflect on things, get deeply immersed in
music. Do not like poetry, reversed. Seldom notice the emotional aspects of paintings and
pictures, reversed. Need a creative outlet; seldom get lost in though, reversed. Seldom
daydream, reversed. See beauty in things that other people might not notice.

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10:54

So, you have imaginative and artistic on that end of the distribution. So, that’s people who are
high in openness.

11:02
Then, intellect. Am quick to understand things; have difficulty understanding abstract ideas,
reversed. Can handle a lot of information, like to solve complex problems; avoid philosophical
discussions, reversed. Avoid difficult reading material, reversed. Have a rich vocabulary, think
quickly; learn things slowly, reversed. Formulate ideas clearly.

11:28
So, you can see that’s the difference between smart and creative, I would say, roughly speaking
or maybe between smart and imaginative. Now, there’s a fair bit of overlap between them, and
IQ, by the way, is very powerfully positively correlated with both of them.

11:41

So, openness to experience seems in large, but not complete part, to be the reflection of IQ
general intelligence in personality, but there’s the creativity dimension to it, too. So, how do you
conceptualize the distribution? Original versus conventional, imaginative versus down-to-earth,
creative versus uncreative, broad interests versus narrow interests, complex versus simple,
curious versus incurious.

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12:14
Imaginative, creative, complex, curious, daring, independent, analytical, untraditional, liberal,
broadly interested. That’s the open types. So, if you think about it, again, in terms of the story
that we’ve been telling, the manner in which this underlying temperamental trait might determine
the goal, people who are high in openness are motivated by ideas for their own sake, and that’s
the people who are high intellect, or my aesthetic experience. They’ll pursue it out as a primary
good, so they orient their world around such pursuits.

12:58
Remember I talked to you about the hierarchy at the beginning with very specific, concrete tasks
at the bottom, behaviors, and more abstract ideas as you move up the hierarchy? I think the
open people’s attentional focus gravitates up the hierarchy, so they’re interested in broader,
lower-resolution ideas where the more concrete types, maybe the more conservative types, or
at least the less open types are more interested in operating at the level of what can be
concretely implemented here and now.

13:30
It’s not obvious again which of those levels of analysis is most appropriate. Sometimes, it’s
useful to concentrate on the details, and sometimes it’s useful to concentrate on the big picture,
and you probably want to have people of both types around.

13:46
Okay, so let’s talk about intellect first, and I’m going to consider intellect the more direct
reflection of IQ, and I’m going to talk about IQ because if you want to determine whether or not

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someone is intelligent, it’s actually better to measure their intelligence with an IQ test than it is to
estimate their intelligence with a personality test like intellect.

14:07
So, most people with a high IQ are interested in ideas. So, we’re going to talk about IQ
because IQ is the most powerful predictor of long-term life outcomes that social scientists have
every identified by a large margin. It’s also an incredibly hot conceptual topic, which I think in
some sense, it’s strange, and it’s not strange. It’s not strange because look, all of you were in
elementary school.

14:35
Most of you are old enough to remember that there were kids who got held back, who failed.
Now, that’s not as common as it used to be, but you know, if you had a class of 35 kids, there
were 2 kids in the class who were likely to be held back, and maybe there was 1 kid who’d been
held back more than once, and that might have been a kid who had behavioral problems, but
often was a kid that he or she just didn’t have the intellectual wherewithal to master the material.

15:06
So, 1 out of 15 to fail at the average level, that’s probably actually an underestimate of the
actual prevalence in the population, and then of course in any class of elementary school kids,
you had kids who could master the curriculum without any effort whatsoever. There was usually
2 or 3 of them. They were the brains of the class, and they had no problem spelling, and they
could read at a grade level that was way above what they were at, and conceptual mastery
came easy to them. Everyone had that experience. That’s the differentiation of people by
intelligence.

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15:41
The problem with it is that it’s both obvious beyond belief and painful beyond bearing because
the truth of the matter is that there’s such a wide variation in human cognitive ability that it’s
actually almost miraculous. If you’re a smart person, let’s say if you have an IQ of 115 and
above, which puts you in the top 15% of the population, that would give you approximately
undergraduate level college education and above. You’re smarter than 85% of the population at
that level.

16:13
Almost all the people you know are as smart as you or smarter. You don’t know anybody who’s
in the other end of the cognitive end of the distribution, 85% and below. There’s just as many
people down that end of the spectrum as there is at the top. You have no idea how much
difference there is between those two categories of people and how difficult it is for people who
are at the low end of the cognitive distribution to manage themselves in a complex, industrial
society.

16:38
So, here’s an example. The US military, which did IQ testing, much of the basic research in IQ
testing, very, very interested the military in rapidly screening people for competence. Why?
Well, because if you’re in a war, it’s like you probably don’t want to lose, and so placing the
most competent people in positions of authority as fast as you possibly can is of paramount
concern, so the Army has always been very much concerned about this. They’ve done IQ
testing.

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17:06
They did IQ research for 100 years, and they concluded—I don’t remember when, but it was
several decades ago, and now this is being passed into American law that it is illegal to induct
into the American armed forces anyone with an IQ of less than 83. That’s 10% of the
population.

17:25
You think about what that means. It’s not like the armed forces doesn’t have a continual
demand for people. They’re an eager employer, particularly in times of combat, but even in
times of peace because across the ideological divide, people use the military in times of peace
to move people from the dysfunctional underclass, let’s say, into the working class or into the
middle class. It’s a good mechanism, maybe not the ideal mechanism, but it’s a good
mechanism potentially for putting people on an upward track.

18:02
So, even during peace time, you want to pull people in, and for the military to conclude that 10%
of the population can’t be trained under any circumstances to do anything useful whatsoever in
an organization as complicated as the armed forces is something to reflect upon because it’s
probably no more complex than ordinary life.

18:26
So, what that essentially means is that our society is already structured so that 10% of the
population is fundamentally unemployable. So, that’s an awful—and, you see, the
conservatives, they don’t like that because they think well, if you just worked hard enough, that’s

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the conscientiousness element, there’d be a job for you. There’s truth in that because hard
work does produce life success.

18:47
The liberals think you can train anyone to do anything, which is palpably untrue and also unfair
to those people you actually can’t train to do complex things, and it’s ungrateful as well. If you
happen to be one of those people, say gifted with an IQ of 145, to say well, you can train
anyone to do anything, look at me, it’s like, yeah right.

19:06
No, sorry. You were 1 in 1,000 at birth, and all due credit, you didn’t screw it up, and you
managed to manifest yourself as a success, but don’t be thinking that your genetic advantage
didn’t have something to do with that. It’s something to be grateful for and to remember, if you
can, what’s like to be on the opposite end of the spectrum.

19:26
So, we should talk a little bit about IQ just so you know what it is because it’s actually very
straightforward, and that’s another thing about it that’s quite painful because it is straightforward,
and it is easy to understand.

19:39
Imagine this. Imagine, first of all, that human beings can engage in abstract problem-solving.
We already talked about that. It’s a function of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, let’s say, or the

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cortex. You could model the world, and you can abstract away from the world, and you can
manipulate the abstractions. That’s thought.

19:55
Okay, now people differ in their ability to do that, to do it with regards to speed and with regards
to a number of variables that they can conceptualize simultaneously, and as well with regards to
how fast they can master new material. Large individual differences, all highly associated with
psychometric intelligence.

20:17

Now, you want to assess how many variables someone can simultaneously process, how fast
they can do it, and how quickly they can learn, and you want to reduce that to a test that you
can administer quite quickly so that you can predict their academic and industrial performance.

20:34
What do you have to do? Here’s the technical way of doing it. Gather a library of 10,000
questions. It doesn’t matter what the questions are. About anything. They can be multiplication
questions. They can be general knowledge questions. They can be vocabulary. They can be
current affairs. It doesn’t matter. Just throw them all into the mix.

20:54
Now, you have your 10,000 questions, so you’ve kind of randomly covered the set of things
people could know or calculate. Now, draw out a random set of 100 questions, and administer
that to 100 people. Then, the score is just how many questions people get right. Then, rank

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order the people from highest score to lowest score. You’ve just rank ordered them by IQ.
That’s all there is to it.

21:24
So, then, here’s what you do next because you want to test the reliability of it. You could wait
two weeks and assess the same people again. You’d get almost exactly the same rank order.
It’s unbelievably stable, even if you did it with a number of years in between, you’d see
tremendous rank order stability

21:41
Then, you could do another trick equally interesting. You could go back to your set of 10,000
questions, draw another random set of 100, test the same people, rank order them, and the
correlation between the rank orders, even though you used different questions would be almost
as high as the correlation between testing the same set of people twice. Right.

22:04
So, it’s an unbelievably reliable test. I truly don’t believe that there’s a more reliable test in all of
social science because reliability exceeds 0.95, 0.96. It’s almost perfectly reliable even over
long spans of time. So, if you want to turn that into an IQ test, all you do is correct for age and
standardize it, and you don’t have to do either of those, but that’s what happens if it’s technically
an IQ test.

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22:30
It’s also corrected for age because older people tend to—it doesn’t matter that much because
older people know more things, but younger people are faster calculators, so your crystalized
intelligence, which is sort of a measure of what you know increases as you age, but your fluid
intelligence, which is how fast you can compute declines. If you want to keep your fluid
intelligence intact, the best thing to do is not cognitive exercises of the sort that were flogged on
the internet a few years ago. There were a bunch of companies that were trying to promote the
idea that active engagement in complex cognitive exercises would maintain or increase your IQ.

23:08
It’s like, wrong. It’s not the case. If you give someone a cognitive exercise, and they practice it.
They get better and better at it, but it does not affect how they do another cognitive exercise,
and there’s no cross-exercise transmission of skill, and even if you took people, and you had
them practice 10 different types of cognitive exercise until they got really good at all 10, and
then you had them practice on an 11​th​, there’d be no transfer of skill.

23:34
No one knows how to increase IQ. You can increase crystallized IQ with education, but
nobody’s figured out how to increase fluid IQ except with nutrition.

23:43
If your kids are well nourished, then that increases their IQ. Actually it’s the other way around.
If they’re not well nourished, it decreases their IQ. If they’re well nourished, then they get as
smart as they have the genetic capacity to be smart, and that’s also, by the way, from a

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developmental perspective in terms of world development goals, the evidence that’s been
generated by people like Bjorn Lomborg [ph] is that if you want to invest worldwide to get the
biggest return on your development investment dollar, the best thing to do is to concentrate on
early childhood nutrition and vaccination. It produces something like a 60 to 1 return on
investment. So, that’s kind of an interesting thing to know.

24:22
Anyways, that’s pretty much all there is to IQ, and that’s kind of terrifying because it’s not that
difficult to understand, and it’s not that difficult to administer, and it’s a deadly predictor of
long-term life success. So, for example, if just before you were born you had the option of being
born at the 95​th​ percentile for wealth or the 95​th ​percentile for IQ in a western society, and the
idea would be to maximize your socioeconomic outcome at the age of 40, which would you
pick? The answer is IQ. It’s a better predictor of success at 40 than the socioeconomic status
of your birth family.

25:00
That to me is actually really—look, there’s some things about this that are really positive, and
this is another thing that you don’t hear talked about at all with regards to the idea that our
culture is an unfair, patriarchal tyranny. The best predictors of success in western culture are
intelligence and conscientiousness.

25:19
It’s like well, what do you want to predict exactly? Like, if you’re going to set up a society that
was set up properly, what would predict better than how fast you can do things, and how much
you can learn and how hard you work? Now, it doesn’t predict perfectly, but those two together,
the correlation with the two together is about 0.6, which is a—again, there isn’t anything in social

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sciences that approaches that as a multi-variant correlation, and 0.6 is pretty d*** high, and it’s
actually an indication of the validity of the dominant structures in our society that intelligence
and conscientiousness are the best predictors of success.

25:55
Now, in entrepreneurial domains, creative domains, it’s IQ and openness, and that’s fine, too,
because you’d hope that in creative and entrepreneurial domains smart, creative people would
do better, and they do. They do markedly better.

26:07
Okay, so that’s IQ, and you see IQ reflected in intellect. So, then we can talk a little bit about
creativity instead as the alternative to IQ. Now, I should tell you one more thing about IQ.

26:23
So, imagine that I asked 1,000 people 1,000 questions, and I factor analyzed their answers,
which is exactly what happened when the personality models were set up. I asked 1,000
people 1,000 questions, but about their own personalities, did a factor analysis and extracted
out five factors.

26:43
What happens if you do that with questions that required abstract reasoning to solve? The
answer is one factor. You get one factor. There’s one kind of intelligence. Now, it’s a bit more
complicated than that, but for all intents and purposes, it collapses into a single factor.

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27:05
You can break it into fluid and crystallized, and it’s tricky because the real IQ in some sense is
the fluid IQ, and the more you use that, the more you learn, and so what happens is that there’s
an association between how much you learn—you can assess that as a measure of your
IQ—and it grows, as you put your fluid intelligence to use.

27:25
It’s like the fluid intelligence is driving the crystallized intelligence. Your fluid intelligence can
collapse under some conditions, and your crystallized intelligence remain intact, but there’s still
reflections of the same thing, which is something like that capacity to learn, number of variables
you can compute at a single moment, and speed of processing.

27:46
That’s associated with some pretty basic biological features, so simple reaction time, for
example. The light goes on, you push a button. If you have a higher IQ, you do it faster, and
that seems to be associated with how thick the myelination is in your neural pathways. So,
that’s pretty straightforward biological representation.

28:05

Brain size is actually fairly highly correlated with IQ among human beings, especially if you
correct for body size. So, people with larger brains, all things considered, are smarter. You
think, well, tell me something I don’t know, but the point is that it’s just another piece of relatively
straightforward evidence that there’s a profound biological underpinning to the differences in
intelligence.

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28:29
Here’s something that’s even more striking, shocking, depressing, factual than that. The richer
and more egalitarian your society, the more the IQ differences are by biological factors. Why?
Well, it’s the same thing that happens with the gender differences. You remove the cultural
variation, all that’s left is the biological variation. So, as you raise everyone up, the mean IQ
increases because the people at the bottom who are now nourished and so forth, their IQ climbs
up, so the population average increases.

29:07
That’s a really good thing, but the variability between people isn’t effected at all. So, you can’t
make societies more equal by providing people with more—not easily anyways—by providing
people with more resources after you account for absolute privation. Getting rid of absolute
privation, that’s a very useful thing, but after that you don’t reduce variability. So, it’s not
surprising that people are so upset about IQ because it seems like something that’s sort of—it’s
profoundly powerful, profoundly predictive, and profoundly unfair.

29:44
So, that’s IQ, but you can’t ignore it, and it’s going to pose a more and more complex technical
problem for us as we advance because I think one of the things that’s happening is the
advantage that smarter people have is being multiplied by computational equipment. You know
how smart a smart person is. Well, you might know, but you think about how smart a smart
person is who knows how to use a computer.

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30:12
It’s like a smart person who knows how to use a computer us so much smarter than a person
who isn’t smart, that doesn’t know how to use a computer. It’s like they don’t even live in the
same conceptual universe. The people who are really flying on computers, man, they have
power beyond. They have intellectual power beyond belief.

30:29
The probability that that divide is going to be magnified over the coming years is unbelievably
high, and you might think well, no because computational power if going to give everyone
access to more information and more intellectual power, and there is truth in that, but you might
have observed this already. We’ve had computers for 30 years.

30:49
Most of the economic returns to the people who use computational technologies still accrue to
those that are on the cutting edge because you can use Word. Well, so can everyone else.
Like, if you could use Word when word processors first came out, wheel that gave you an
advantage, but now it’s like yeah, well you’re a dime a dozen.

31:06
If you’re a high-level computer programmer, that’s a whole different story, especially if you’re at
the top of your game because there’s sort of an infinite demand for you, so you still have to stay
on that cutting edge, and that’s pretty much a function of intelligence with some
conscientiousness thrown in there. So, it’s a very rough problem, man, and it isn’t obvious.

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31:26
You know, you hear solutions to this problem of inequality. We’re going to give everyone a
guaranteed national income, say basic income, and one of the real problems with that in my
estimation is it’s really hard on conscientious people because let’s say you’re conscientious, but
you’re not very smart. So, it’s hard for you to find a job, but you don’t want to be unemployed,
man. It just tears you apart because that’s another thing about being conscientious. If you’re
conscientious, and you lose your job, you are one suffering creature.

31:52
If you’re unconscientious you don’t care, but if you’re conscientious, then all of the sudden
you’ve been rendered useless, I mean that violates your sense of your own moral propriety
profoundly and drives people into extreme depressions. So, the idea that a guaranteed basic
income will be useful for people who are conscientious strikes me as highly improbable.

32:14
I think the problem is deeper than that. It isn’t how are we going to provide people with enough
material resources so that they can scrape by, let’s say, or even flourish to some degree
materially speaking. It’s how are we going to provide people who are on the lower end of the
cognitive distribution with a genuine purpose and place in a complex technological society. It’s
like, man, we got our work cut out for us on that front.

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32:39
Okay, Creative Achievement Questionnaire. It’s associated with openness, not intellect.
Intellect is associated mostly with IQ, especially fluid IQ. Creativity is associated more with
verbal IQ, by the way, and so let’s talk a little bit about creative achievements.

32:54
So, when we set out to measure it, we noticed that there wasn’t a measure of creative
accomplishment in the literature, and that seemed to be a big lack because creative
accomplishments seem to be very important and might be useful to get the measurement of it
correct.

33:13
So, what we did was we identified ten domains of potential creativity. We tried to be relatively
comprehensive without going overboard, and so the ten dimensions were visual arts, that’s
painting or sculpture, music, dance, architectural design, creative writing, humor, inventions,
scientific discovery, theater and film, and culinary arts.

33:35
Probably should have had a separate category for entrepreneurial achievement. That’d be sort
of shoehorned into inventions, but it doesn’t matter. It would have been nice, but we didn’t do it,
and it’s still a reliable and valid measure.

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33:52
Then what we did was we rank ordered levels of accomplishment within each domain, and then
we had professionals in each domain, accomplished professionals, check the rank ordering.
So, here’s typical rank ordering.

34:05

Visual arts, painting, sculpture. Zero, I have no training or recognized talent in this area. One,
I’ve taken lesson in this area. Two, people have commented on my talent, a little bit of social
validation. Three, I have won a prize or prizes at a juried art show. Four, I’ve had a showing of
my work in a gallery. Five, I’ve sold a piece of my work. Six, my work has been critiqued in
local publications. Seven, my work has been critiqued in national publications.

34:38
So, you can see that there’s a pretty decent leap in status and accomplishment with each level
and that there’s going to be a rapid falloff in terms of the number of people who’ve
accomplished that. So, that’s visual arts.

34:49

Music. I’ll just read you a couple of these so you get a sense. I have no training or recognized
talent in this area. Skip to dance. One, I play one or more musical instruments proficiently.
Two, I have played with a recognized orchestra or band. Three, I have composed an original
piece of music. Four, my musical talent has been critiqued in a local publication. Five, my

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composition has been recorded. Six, it has been copywrited. Seven, recordings have been
sold publicly.

35:21
Okay, so you fill out the questionnaire with your levels of accomplishment, and then we sum
across all the levels of accomplishment, and that produces your Creative Achievement score,
and it’s not normally distributed with most people in the middle, some people way on the
creative end, and some people way low. What it is, is skewed like this.

35:42
What’s the—yes, this is it. The median response per category, so the median response is the
most frequent response, not the average response, but he most frequent response. In each
domain, 60% of respondents scored zero. Right, zero.

36:04
The next most frequent response is one; 26% of the respondents score one. So, 86% of people
score zero or one in each domain, and so if you add up across domains, you find that there’s a
tremendous number of people who stack up at zero. That’s, by far, the most common level of
creative achievement, zero, and the next most common is one.

36:27
Then, there’s a tiny proportion of people who are way out on the distribution who score, 50, 60,
200, 300, and they’re the people who, the small minority of people who are creative. That

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Pareto distribution, which is what that is, that seems to characterize everything that’s associated
with individual variability in creative production. It’s a funny law.

36:55
So, here’s the sorts of phenomena that seem to be distributed in that Pareto manner. Size of
cities, so a small number of cities have most of the people. Height of plants in the jungle. Mass
of stars. A small number of stars in the galaxy have most of the mass.

37:20
If you’re in any sports domain, number of goals scored is Pareto distributed as well, number of
championships won. The distribution of money, as I already pointed out is Pareto distributed,
and so is the distribution of productivity in industrial settings.

37:38

So, it isn’t exactly obvious why that is, but I think it’s because success works like this. You could
think well here’s failure. That’s the failure path. Here’s the success response. That’s linear,
going uphill a linear way, but it doesn’t look like it’s like that. It looks like you go up like this. So,
it’s zero, zero, zero, acceleration. It’s hard to get past zero, but once you do, you could
accelerate rapidly.

38:11

Failure is the opposite way. You fail a little bit, you fail a little bit, you fall a lot, and I think the
reason is that you get feedback loops developing. So, you know, if you’re successful at one

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thing, then more opportunities come your way and so do more people. More people open more
doors for you and more opportunities manifest themselves. Once good things start to happen,
each good thing that happens seems to increase the probability that another good thing will
happen on the creativity or the productivity or the capital accumulation front.

38:48
On the negative front, the same thing happens. Every time something bad happens to you,
then it increases the probability that something additionally bad will happen to you. So, you get
this strange phenomenon that seems to be associated with the Pareto distribution.

39:04
Alright. So, we tried to validate the Creative Achievement Questionnaire to see if it was a
decent predictor of creativity in general. We did a study, the first validation study, and it worked
out quite nicely. One of the things that Shelly had her subjects do was to make—she made a
collage kit, so everything got a standard kit. It was like here’s some glue, and here’s your
collage kit. Why don’t you make a collage? So, we had everybody make a collage?

39:37
Then, we had a panel, I believe, of seven artists rate the collage for creativity. The first thing we
found was—see, the first thing you want to detect is if you rank ordered all the ratings from each
artist, would there be some relationship between all the ratings because artist one might think
person A is creative, and artist two might think they’re not creative at all. It might just be
random, no reliable assessment of creativity across the raters at all.

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40:07
It turned out not to be the case that the seven artists pretty reliably rated, so with a fair bit of
agreement, how aesthetically pleasing the collage actually was. So, that was a good thing
because it wasn’t obvious that that would be the case because it seems there’s obviously an
element of subjectivity. It wouldn’t have been easy, I don’t think, for the artists to articulate what
criteria they were using to determine whether the composition was aesthetically pleasant, but
maybe they could get it at a glance. Maybe it has something to do with complex pattern
recognition, which I think is highly probable.

40:48
Anyways, the Creative Achievement Questionnaire was highly correlated with artists’ ratings of
creativity, of this one piece of creative output, and it was also highly correlated with intelligence,
with divergent thinking. That was those creative tests that I told you about earlier with
Goldberg’s Intellect Scale, which is the intellect scale before we built the Big Five Aspect Scale
that had openness and intellect.

41:14
So, all of the measures that we could come up with suggested that it was a valid area, and
that’s a good example of the manifestation of openness in the real world.

41:28
So, let’s summarize openness to experience. Well, it breaks into openness and intellect.
Openness seems to be associated with imaginativeness and creativity and intellect with interest

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and ideas. Both of them are tightly associated with IQ, intellect particularly with nonverbal IQ
and openness with verbal IQ.

41:51
There’s wide, wide variability in human cognitive differences, and the variability drives economic
differentiation and also differential in terms of productivity, and that’s a really hard conundrum
because if it was just driving income distribution differences, then you could flatten out the
income distribution, and you could think of that as fair, but if it’s also driving radical differences
in productivity, then it’s not so easy to level the playing field economically because it seems to
make a certain amount of success that to allow those who can to do, even if it might be mostly
to their benefit.

42:29
It’s also of unbelievable significant benefit to everyone else, and maybe there’s some utility in
trying to bribe people, so to speak, with the structure of your economic system so that those
who are the most competent at solving complex problems are also the most highly motivated to
do it. One of the outcomes of that is going to be an ineradicable element of inequality.

42:52
Okay, well we can just review everything very quickly. I’ll do that in two or three minutes. So,
we started by laying out the biological basis of personality, essentially, and also describing how
the social structure simplifies the world, and I suggested that traits are rules of thumb for
interacting with the world, quick and dirty rules of thumb for interacting with the world.

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43:18
Then, we talked about measurement a bit and described the manner in which psychologists
have come to a stable personality model over the last three or four decades and what it means
for a model to be stable and how a model like that might be useful in terms of prediction, control,
and understanding.

43:35
Then, we talked about the five traits and the ten aspects: extroversion associated with positive
emotion, neuroticism associated with negative emotion, agreeableness associated perhaps with
maternal behavior and predatory aggression although often socialized predatory aggression,
conscientiousness associated with industriousness whatever that is, the escape from guilt and
shame possibly and also with orderliness associated with disgust, and then finally openness to
experience, which seems to be associated both with intelligence which we discussed and also
with creativity.

44:10
So, that’s the basic landscape of up-to-date psychometric modeling of personality, and hopefully
the consequence of knowing this information is that you have a better sense of who you are and
who the people around you are and how much people differ and how important it is for us to
know all of that in some accurate manner.

44:37
So, on that note, thank you very much for attending. It was a pleasure talking to you. Hopefully,
people will find this useful and productive, so thank you very much.

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45:11
Do you have obligations?

45:15
I do.

45:16
Is there time for people to shake—just a quick hand on the way out, or do you hve to bolt right
this second?

45:24
I have to bolt this second. I’m sorry about that, but that’s life at the moment. So, again, thank
you for coming. Thank you very much for your support. Keep an eye on if you’re interested in
what’s happening on Twitter because this whole battle about Patreon and YouTube is being
played out there right now. So, hopefully something halfway intelligent will come of it, but I’m
not holding my breath.

45:46
So, again, thanks very much for coming, and it was a pleasure seeing you all. Thank you for
your support.

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