The unfortunate (but necessary) negativity of young genius

*

Because creativity is bound-up with character (specifically, the personality trait of high Psychoticism), it comes in a package. And some aspects of the creativity package are annoying for other people - understandably so.

William Wordsworth is generally ranked as one of the three greatest English poets writing in modern English (along with Shakespeare and Milton) - he also has a reputation as being a rather dull and quiet kind of person.

On the whole, this reputation is broadly correct; but Wordsworth showed unmistable traits of high Psychoticism, including selfishness/ autonomy - but especially in his early life.

*

In the biographies of highly creative people, including geniuses, there is often a prolonged period when they do very little - they display pronounced negativity: that is to say they know what they do not want to do, but they have not discovered what they do want to do.

This happened in Wordsworth's life. From his second year at Cambridge University he more or less 'gave up' on studying, on preparing himself for making a living, on indeed on pursuing any kind of long term strategy: but he didn't do anything else much.

He wasted quite a lot of money given by his relatives (for example the fees and living expenses of three years at Cambridge, from his Uncle), he mooched around London, he did some travelling in search of something to stimulate him (including fathering an illegitimate child in France when absorbing the revolutionary fervour) and so on.

Even as a grown up, living quietly in Dove Cottage with his sister, Wordsworth took the brightest and warmest room for his poetry writing, and the whole household was organized around his poetic requirements.

*

(Tut tut, poor Dorothy, consigned to the gloomy parlour. Yet if William had not been selfish, and had not nurtured his genius, then we would not be talking about Dove Cottage and Dorothy at all!)   

*

Only after many years of this did Wordsworth find his vocation as A Poet, and worked very productively at this.

Now, Wordsworth was one of the most sober and industrious of The Romantics, and there are far more extreme examples of negativity including his great friend Coleridge - who exaggerated these traits by deliberate, then addicted, alchohol and opium abuse.

But the point I wish to make is that even Wordsworth showed clear signs of the cluster of high Psychoticism traits, which meant that he could (and did) work hard and long at what he wanted to work hard at; but could not work at anything else.

*

As a young man, when creativity is at its highest, Wordsworth would not and could not and did not work at what other people wanted him to work at, and this is the negativity. 

It is easy to imagine Wordsworth dying before he wrote any great poetry, or failing to find and develop his vocation, and being considered nothing but a selfish waster.

Of course, being a high negativity selfish  waster does not, not, NOT make anybody a creative genius; but being a creative genius almost always did entail going through a period of being a selfish waster and looking for The Thing that would stimulate you to hard and prolonged work - and during this period of looking perhaps being derailed by other stimuli such as women and drugs - and with no guarantee of ever coming out of the other side and achieving work of genius which is highly valued. 

*

A creative genius almost always comes with a price tag, the cost of which is mostly paid by those around him.

If nobody pays the price, the genius does not eventuate.

Harsh - but that's life, I'm afraid.

*

Shamans and creativity

*

About a decade ago I was reading everything I could find on the subject of shamans - scholarship, ethnography, memoirs and journals, literary theory, criticism, archeology, history, new age spirituality, self-help and do-it-yourself manuals...

My conclusion was that, roughly - a shaman is a specialist - usually male - figure found in hunter-gatherer and some other nomadic and simple agricultural societies.

The 'ideal type' of a shaman is characterized by having experiences of contact with the spirit world, or some other unseen world, in states of altered consciousness. Shamans have various functions such as healing ('medicine men'), and providing advice, judgement, understanding.

Shamans seem to be a clear prototype of the creative person and his role in society.

*

The way that shamans are seemingly marked-out from an early age - chosen-by their nature for their particular role - may provide confirmation that creativity is part of a package of personality traits; such that creativity is something like an innate disposition, a way of relating to the world - and not a thing chosen or deliberately adopted.

Thus a person is a shaman, and shamanism is his destiny; by analogy a person is creative, and creativity is his destiny - and the shamanism/ creativity is a fact: true or not true; although of course each person can choose, and may choose differently, what they do about their nature and destiny.

*

Now, the category of shaman is a modern, Western conceptualization which unifies disparate figures found in a wide range of tribal situations and from different historical times.

The term was originally Siberian and this may link culturally to Amerindian examples (including among Eskimos/ Inuits, through classic 'Red Indians'/ Native Americans; to Amazonians and Patagonians); but shamans are also instanced among the Bushmen of the Kalahari desert in Africa and Aborigines in Australia; and indeed wherever there is an animistic, or simple totemistic, religion.

*

However, despite the many fair points made by revisions which tend to suggest that the whole area of shamans is so vague and confused that it would be better to dispense with the term; I believe it does have value.

The key point is that shamans were unexpected figures for anthropologists - found in some types of simple society; but apparently either completely absent from Western societies - or else hidden so deeply as to be undetectable by official investigators.

So anthropologists might expect to find priests, analogous to the already known priests of the Western, Middle Eastern and Far Eastern societies - but shamans are not priests. A new category was needed.

*

What do shamans do?

My overall impression is that they are called upon to deal with exceptional situations - situations where there is no traditional guidance, or where the traditional guidance has been tried and found to be ineffective.

Such situations could include some types of illness, when and where to move for better hunting, what to do about threats from predators or other tribes, 'legal' judgement in difficult cases - many types of advice and guidance, interpretation and prophecy.

To do this, shamans use altered states of consciousness - trance states of various types or visionary dreams - during which shamans contact the underlying spirit world for information and prediction, or to intervene and change things.

In a nutshell, shamans are believed to be able to come into contact with a deeper level of reality than the everyday - and that is the source of their abilities - and their societal role.

*

So, the impression from reading many accounts is that shamans are highly creative persons - and therefore I would expect that they would show the Psychoticism-like traits of high creativity; and this seems to be confirmed.

Shamans usually emerge from an early age of life - either childhood or teens; the shaman is either marked from an early age as being different, or else goes through a (typically) traumatic experience of illness, accident or some other stress, which changes them permanently. Thus shamans are flawed, damaged people who also (because of this, not despite it) have special gifts.

The shaman is usually a man - usually not socially integrated, usually lives somewhat apart, may be unfriendly -  a person feared and respected rather than loved and cherished.

Often unmarried, without known children - someone who hands on his social role by apprenticeship rather than founding a lineage.

Someone who does not work, but is supported by payments for services and charity/ protection money - at least he does not do work as it applies to the rest of the tribe - hunting gathering, agriculture, warfare, child care... 

*

It would obviously help if the shaman was more-than-usually intelligent as well as more-than-usually creative - but it is probable that these hunter gatherer, nomadic, simple hunter-gatherer societies have not been selected for higher intelligence over hundreds of years - as have some of the more stable and more complex agricultural societies.

So the actual intelligence of real life shamans may have been considerably below what we would consider average - just as the creativity of the average person in the societies they inhabit would be considerably above our average.

By this logic the creativity of a great shaman might have been something quite extraordinary - off the map of our modern, Western understasnding of the possibilities of creativity.

*

But it is not the exceptional intelligence that sets the shaman apart - rather it is the different cognitive style: the shaman approaches problems differently, or creatively as we would say - he does not apply the usual, traditional, high status or socially sanctioned rules or practices; but instead generates his unpredictable answers using quite different processes and procedures.

And this is something that the shaman cannot help doing: he is made that way, he is called to a role. Most of the time he is not wanted, scary, chaotic, nasty, a nuisance, a parasite - but there are situations when he is needed. and it is for these situations that the shaman is protected by the rest of the tribe.

*

Thinking about thinking creatively

*

Creativity is about abstraction of function from the social situation - this is a necessary preliminary to being creative about something.

The basic situation, then, is for a human to be embedded in the social context - being sensitive to the nature of the social context, sensitive and responsive to the feelings and wishes of others.

The basic situation is that humans are set-up to be embedded in this context - with various aims: keeping other people happy, aiming to have high status within the context, hoping for power over others and so on...

Creativity entails detachment from this whole social context - and instead focusing upon 'the problem', the function, the goal. That is the basic situation.

This is the basic set-up of creativity. Creativity is a basic set-up in which the creative person is intrinsically detached from social context - and whose interests are external to himself; where the self is bound-up with objective, non-social externals.

So creativity is a disposition, a way of approaching the world, a focus, an emotional concern with the non-social doings of the world.

*

Genius, creativity and breakthrough innovations

*

It is necessary to be clear about the relationship between creativity and genius - and the relationship between genius and breakthroughs.

The following are some of my definitions and assumptions:

1. Genius is creative - it is a mixture of creativity and high ability (mostly intelligence).

2. Creativity is an aspect of personality - creativity is indeed part of the cluster of personality traits discovered by HJ Eysenck and called Psychoticism. The Psychoticism trait-cluster also tends to include various 'antisocial' or socially disvalued personality traits such as lower than average conscientiousness, lower than average empathy/ agreeableness, impulsiveness, arrogance etc. - these are, in fact, necessary components of creativity.

3. Because intelligence and personality are mostly hereditary, so are the components of genius - but the necessary particular combination is rare.

4. Because intelligence and personality averages and distributions are different between human groups, so is the incidence of genius - some societies have a much higher percentage of geniuses than others; but this incidence is never very high, and may be zero.

*

5. Because genius has been defined in terms of psychological attributes, the assumption is that these attributes will tend to lead to the achievements which are associated with genius - but not necessarily. A person may be a genius, but for various reasons (bad luck, inhospitable society, underdeveloped culture, illness, persecution etc) fail to make a major achievement.

5. On the other hand, I assume that ALL major achievement (all major breakthroughs) are made by a genius - whether correctly attributed to a specific genius person, or not. Apparent counter examples, e.g. when major breakthroughs are apparently made by people of high intelligence but low creativity (or to 'teams'), will (I believe) almost-always be found to depend on the work of an unattributed creative genius (or pair, or very small number) - and if that person cannot be identified, I assume that they nonetheless existed.

6. Therefore, without major geniuses, there are no major breakthroughs.

*

But genius is relative - in the sense that creative people of lower ability, and less luck, may make important breakthroughs at a smaller societal scale, and perform as 'local geniuses' uniquely able to solve local problems (whether credited for doing so, or not).

I have (provisionally) termed these 'local geniuses' Patagonian Shakespeares.

*

Is creativity random? An intrinsic ability? No: ultimately it is a matter of sensitivity to external inspiration

*

Most scientific accounts of creativity converge onto the idea that creativity is one half of a kind of natural selection process by which creativity produces an undirected spectrum of undirected 'random' variations, and intelligence selects plausibly true or useful variants from this spectrum by testing the variants against established knowledge.

(High intelligence being necessary - or at least very useful- to make these large numbers of comparisons that are testing random variants against knowledge with sufficient rapidity; and a large knowledge base being facilitated by that rapid learning which is characteristic of high intelligence).

*

But, this convergence of scientific theories upon creativity being random is not a discovery of science, rather it is simply a consequence of the metaphysical assumptions of science.

Science as a metaphysical system excludes teleology, excludes there being any direction for functionality whereby a system might 'know in advance' what was closer to reality. Indeed, science denies the possibility of comparing theories and experiments with reality to estimate how close they come - because if reality was known outwith science, then there would be no need to do science - it would merely be a long-cut to reality, a resource-consuming and indirect method of doing-philosophy .

*

So, the basic set-up of science excludes the possibility of creativity being directed toward discovery of the nature of reality.

This exclusion of teleology has not and never could be discovered by science - it is built-into science, and emerges with inevitability (when it is sometimes - often! - naively mistaken for a discovery!).

Yet, in practice teleology is almost always smuggled into science covertly - and this seems to be inevitable considering that the number of possible random variations which could be generated is open-ended ('infinite') and there is no possibility of sorting among them.

*

However, the idea that creativity is random leads to some important - but false conclusions: for example the idea that there is 'something wrong' with the brains/ thought processes of creative people.

This idea is indeed in the background of Eysenck's work on creativity, and is a flaw - but it is a flaw shared with all the other psychologists I have read on the topic. Eysenck sees creativity in terms of a fuzziness of the thought processes, a widening of the association-field of thinking - which generates more random variation in the associational-chain of reasoning; this wider-variation/ imprecision then being sifted and selected-from by the extra powers of an extra-high intelligence.

In sum, according to this prevalent view, the creative genius is one who produces more randomly-generated garbage from his thinking, but who is also much better than average at sorting the garbage - and consequently finds the occasional nugget of usefulness among the garbage.

*

As I say, this conclusion is not a discovery but in fact a necessary consequence of the metaphysical assumptions brought to the field. And it is a conclusion which - although not impossible in principle - may be impossible in practice due to the likelihood that randomness generates an impossibly high ratio of wrong/ useless variation compared with the rarity of correct/ useful variation.

I think this view also fails to correspond with common sense ideas about creative genius, or even everyday creativity; and also fails to match the 'phenomenology' or introspective psychology of successful creation (so far as this can be ascertained) - which has teleological (goal-seeking) features, and a sense of sureness and truth very much a part of it.

*

Nonetheless, regarding creativity as random has fed into (or at least supports) the prevalent modern Western secular account of creativity as being about novelty, and the distortion of evaluation which sees novelty as merely something different - and which reject the possibility of evaluating novelties.

I mean the view that puts 'modern art' (post Picasso) on a level with the great art of the past, and the latest critic-approved examples of 'artistic genius' into galleries alongside Rembrandt.

And the view (the prevalent, mainstream view among professional psychologists) with argues that this novelty-creativity comes from the (incoherent) personality trait called Openness to Experience -

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openness_to_experience

- which more or less reduces to the personality trait of being high IQ with Left wing views.

This modern 'creativity' is essentially definable as high status novelty; derived from almost-randomly-generated novelty (in practice, novelty generated by rote procedures of extrapolation from or selection and recombination of the products of past-creativity derived form social and political studies) - upon which are conferred high social status by the prevalent dominant secular Left wing intelligentsia.

*

But, but but...

The traditionally, in previous non-secular cultures; the underlying reality of creativity, above and beyond science, is that creativity is primarily from outwith the creative person.

That the creative person is one who has some gift conferred from outwith himself - from inspiration - the muses, gods or evil spirits.

So the creative person is not - in the final bottom-line analysis - someone with a particular ability, but someone with a particular sensitivity.

Namely, a particular sensitivity to these sources of external inspiration - inspirations which may be benign/ useful, or indeed malign and destructive. 

*

In an evil society, most creativity will be evil: most creatives will be engaged in destruction of The Good

*

Although I argue for the importance of creativity in human affairs, and therefore of the importance of the creatives who do the primary work of creativity; it should not be forgotten that creativity is a means to an end - and when the end is evil, so is creative activity.

Modern society has become more and more evil - which is to say organized in pursuit of destruction of The Good - the Good being (roughly) truth, beauty and virtue.

Thus modern leadership is engaged in destruction of truth, beauty and virtue; and in promotion of dishonesty, ugliness and sin - especially sexual sins.

*

That is, modern leadership embodies and enforces a morality which takes reality and inverts it - so that good becomes evil and vice versa.

This Nietzschian project of 'the transvaluation of all values' is incompletely realized, and indeed cannot be fully realized - but 'progress' towards its realization continues incrementally.

In such a context, it is unsurprising that most creativity is harnessed in pursuit of evil.

*

In the first place, much of this distinctively modern form of evil by inversion is a product of highly creative persons, such as Nietzsche himself, and lesser emulators who not only extrapolated his ideas, but creatively enhanced them.

Secondly, due the the fact of creativity being part of the personality type of 'psychoticism' - creatives tend to be vulnerable to the consequences of impulsivity and less restrained by social ethics: they are lone wolves with a potentially predatory attitude which is relatively easily corrupted by short-term and selfish incentives.

Thirdly, creatives - who might in principle exercise their creativity on anything - will find but may not notice that they have themselves been pointed-at traditional institutions and values; in a context where creativity is akin to subversion, and where successful subversion of approved targets is applauded, and accorded high status and material support.

*

In sum, modern creatives are highly likely to be amateur or professional destroyers of the good - in their net effect if not wholly.

That would, indeed, be my characterization of my own creativity as a writer through most of my life. While I worked on some good causes - such as supporting real science - overall I surely did more harm than good in terms of both direct and indirect subversions of The Good.

This is one of the horrors of our uniquely nihilistic world. Humans have always failed to attain The Good due to our own weaknesses and those of mankind - but we are now in the situation where it is normal actively to attack The Good, by many means and on many fronts - so that both creative ability and hard-working conscientiousness do not merely fail of their promise and their ideals - but are harnessed to work against The Good.

*

(For example, I suspect many creatives work in the world of public relations, the mass media, hype and spin generally - most excercise their creativity in tactically re-framing reality to serve the short-term and selfish needs of their employers; while the best creatives are engaged in long-term and strategic PR for the ruling Leftist ideology of political correctness.)  

*

In sum, most modern creatives are of evil intent; and the more effective their creativity, the greater the harm they inflict.

*

Ordinary genius? Is it real genius? No - only the 'magicians' are real geniuses

*

No ordinary genius is the title of a photographic biography of Richard Feynman.

The term comes from a quotation from Mark Kac which states:

In science, as well as in other fields of human endeavor, there are two kinds of geniuses: the “ordinary” and the “magicians.”

An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what he has done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it.

It is different with the magicians. They are, to use mathematical jargon, in the orthogonal complement of where we are and the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark.

They seldom, if ever, have students because they cannot be emulated and it must be terribly frustrating for a brilliant young mind to cope with the mysterious ways in which the magician’s mind works. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber. Hans Bethe, whom [Freeman] Dyson considers to be his teacher, is an “ordinary genius,”

*

So, Kac says there are ordinary geniuses and magicians; which would respond to high psychoticism, high creativity geniuses - and those who are highly intelligent but conscientious in personality and who are not primarily creative - but who instead extrapolate from previous work.

(Magicians correspond to high Psychoticism creatives - who deploy primary process thinking, which cannot be captured by logic.)  

*

I would say that only magicians are true creative geniuses, and Kac's 'ordinary geniuses' are not actually geniuses, but are in a sense parasitic upon true geniuses.

(At best OGs are symbiotic with magicians, in practice they are often exploitative.)

In other words, I suggest that the primary innovations 'always' come from the 'magicians' - but in a domain where there are magicians at work, then un-creative and highly able people are able to make major contributions by taking the results of the magicians, and taking them further.

BUT - in a world where there are only 'ordinary geniuses' (that is, only intelligent and conscientious people who lack creativity) - innovations soon dry-up.

*

So 'ordinary' or un-creative geniuses are extremely useful in amplifying the productions of wizards/ creative geniuses; and may indeed be difficult to differentiate from the true geniuses (since the creative source of the original ideas may not be apparent, and the creative underpinning may be unappreciated, unacknowledged or appropriated).

But 'ordinary genius' is deceptive. Institutions love 'ordinary geniuses' because they have much easier, friendlier, more sociable and obedient personalities - and 'ordinary geniuses' therefore tend, over time, to dominate career structures and gather power to themselves and bureaucratize the domain - and thereby to exclude the difficult misfit high psychoticism magicians - and indirectly kill-off major innovation in that field.

*

Fake creativity versus real creativity

*

In discussing creativity, a decision must be made as to whether we are going to give primacy to process or outcome.

(Not neglecting the other of the pair: but one or the other must come first).

I put process first - and therefore discuss creativity and how it leads to what are generally regarded as creative results - so if the work leading to a science Nobel Prize is regarded as a creative outcome, then I would say that some science Nobel Prizewinners were highly creative persons, but some were not. The same would apply to great composers, great writers, great artists etc.

*

If creativity is process, a mode of thinking; then this means that many or most of the people who produce work which is generally regarded as extremely useful, beautiful or true are not creative. 

Furthermore, most creative people ('creatives') do not achieve anything that is generally regarded as useful, beautiful or true.

So it is not a compliment to call somebody creative or 'a creative' - it is simply a description of a personality type. 

(A personality type which is very poorly understood, hence the reason for my writing about it.)

*

In previous eras, there was not a special status given to novelty or originality as an aspect of high quality work - but since about 1800 in the West there has been: greatness is supposedly innovative.

Therefore we have an incentive system in place to generate fake creativity: an incentive system in which there are un-creative people who dishonestly strive to be regarded as original because they want to appropriate the label of creative.

In sum, under modernity creativity has been reduced to novelty - and novelty can be faked.

*

But it is easy to generate mere novelty, therefore the discriminative test applied to novelties is whether they are approved by the social systems that allocate high status.

When novelty is socially approved, then the person who generated it gets to be called creative - maybe even a creative genius.

Thus:  Novelty of outcome + Social Approval of that outcome = Fake creativity

*

And fake creativity is an attribute bestowed upon an outcome or person; bestowed by the social systems for generating status - in other words the mass media (primarily), politics, civil administration, the legal system, education... in a nutshell the Leftist establishment.

So, as you would expect, political correctness has captured creativity - and replaced real creativity with a fake creativity which is controlled by the arbiters of modernity: that is, mostly the mass media.

This to claim to be a 'creative' person has been changed from being the mere observation of a psychological fact; to an arrogant claim of deserving high social status for having achieved something which is approved by social arbiters.

*

This matter of being able to define/ bestow the accolade of creativity is of extreme importance to the Leftist intellectual establishment - indeed, fake creativity stands close to the heart of the Leftist project - because the Left works mainly via manipulations of esteem, including self-esteem.

*

How to be more creative - gratuitous advice

*

Increasing the proportion of unstructured time alone is the key - as Glenn Gould once said:

GOULD: I don't know what the effective ratio would be, but I've always had some sort of intuition that for every hour you spend in the company of other human beings, you need "x" number of hours alone. Now, what "x" represents I don't really know; it might be two and seven-eighths or seven and two-eighths, but it is a substantial ratio.

Secondly, you may need to find whether you are an evening or a morning person - an owl or a lark: I am a lark, so I get up at 05.00 hours and do my best thinking/ creative stuff before 11.00. But most creatives are owls.

Thirdly - you need to get enough sleep of sufficiently high quality: a lot of creativity happens during sleep.

*

So the following need to be got right: 

1. Unstructured time
2. Diurnal rhythm
3. Sleep

*

The rarity of creativity

*

I believe creativity is rare, because creative people are rare - and by rare I mean a small minority, the size of which varies between societies.

*

Evidence?

Well I am impressed by the long periods of stasis which are detected in human technology in some periods and places - periods of many, many generations when flint axes and other tools are (apparently) produced to exactly the same patterns, when 'art' (or decorations) are stereotyped and so on.

Some cultures change rapidly (in terms of the evidence they left us) others not so - my interpretation is that change is underpinned by rare creative individuals - which are seldom or never found in other societies.

*

And I agree with HJ Eysenck who argued that creativity is an aspect of the high 'Psychoticism' personality trait - which is typically found in only a small minority of population samples. These samples are typically taken from among college students - so the finding emphasizes that there are only a small minority of college students who are creative.

That the distribution of Psychoticism has a strongly 'positive skew'

in most samples is taken as evidence against its usefulness - but I regard this as simply how things are: there - there is only a small proportion of high-P people, and therefore an even smaller proportion of creative people; since the high P category also contains people who are suffering psychotic illness, are selfish psychopaths, and who are so chaotic and impulsive as to be incapable of sustained purposive action.

*

Everyday experience and the implications of cultural observation. My observations suggest that most people are incapable of creative thinking, and cannot understand it. They accept that somebody or something is creative only because the fact is asserted by those they regard as authoritative - this is merely obedience, not recognition.

In mainstream culture, some fields of activity - e.g. being a poet or a visual artist or a musician - are assigned to the category of creative (as in the phrase creative arts) when there is typically zero creativity involved in these endeavors - conversely it is regarded as fanciful to regard tradesmen or entrepreneurs or the unemployed as creative.

*

Aside, I do not mean to imply a dichotomy of creative good, un-creative bad. I suspect that - perhaps because primary roles are closed to them - most of the few successful creatives in the modern West are currently engaged in evil-tending activities in the mass media, advertizing, public relations, politics, spin and hype. Whereas in the past, creatives were engaged in solving real world problems, creatives are nowadays mostly engaged in denying and distracting from real world problems - and in manufacturing imaginary problems to draw attention away from reality.

*

Furthermore, I have theoretical grounds for suspecting that natural selection cannot generate a high proportion of highly creative people; because I think that genetic/ reproductive benefits of creativity generally accrue very equally to the group - successful creativity makes most of a creative-containing-group successful at increasing its reproduction compared with other groups - and does not much or at all increase the reproductive success of the specific creative person who made the 'breakthrough'.

I think this is strongly suggested by the history of breakthroughs, as well as the biographies of known successful creatives, who have increased the reproductive success of their group - the creatives typically do not seem to be 'rewarded' by raising large families.

*

So creativity = creative individuals seem to arise in particular times and places, as a low proportion of the population, and created and sustained by somewhat indirect and fragile mechanisms - easily subverted by short-termism and selfishness; which is why modern society is in practice so hostile to genuine creativity - except when creativity serves short-termist and selfish goals....

*

Why Concientiousness, Agreeableness/ Empathizing are anti-creative

*

The positive correlation between creativity and Eysenck's Psychoticism trait, also implies a positive correlation with the more specific Schizotypy trait, and a negative (inverse) correlation with Big Five traits of Conscientiousness and Agreeableness (and Agreeableness is essentially identical with Simon Baron Cohen's Empathizing trait).

The inverse correlation of Creativity in terms of C and A is understandable, and necessary - once C and A are properly understood.

*

Creativity implies a strong ego, a person who looks at a situation and comes up with something different because he believes it possible - even probable - that he knows better than other people, and is (to some extent) indifferent to the opinions of others on this matter.

Conscientiousness is sometimes conceptualized in terms of delayed gratification - the ability to put-off gratification now, in return for greater gratification in the future. For example, to defer the pleasure of playing and instead study academic subjects - forgoing current pleasure of play, and suffering the tedium of work, for a (hoped for) greater pleasure in the future.

But this is an error - because it is not the way the mind is motivated. The mind actually works by maximizing current gratification - by doing what is positively rewarding, and avoiding what yields negative emotions.

*

Therefore the proper way to conceptualize Conscientiousness is that a high C person gets more gratification here and now by doing what they feel is best to do, or necessary to do, or which they have been told to do by an authority, or what they are supposed to do according to peer pressure.

Therefore, high C implies a high degree of concern for internalized social norms - a tendency to feel good (here and now) when conforming to these social norms/ values - and/or a tendency to feel bad (e.g. guilty, ashamed, afraid) when transgressing or failing to follow these social norms.

This is what links Conscientiousness to Agreeableness or Empathizing - a dominating concern with the views of other people - attention to knowing the emotions and wishes of others, a calibrations of one's own (observed or perceived) behaviours to stay in line with the expectations or desires of others.

*

So, it can be seen that Conscientiousness and Agreeableness are two side of the same coin (and the inverse of Psychoticism) - which is that a person high in Conscientiousness and also Agreeableness is one who - here and now, and in the present moment - derives the greatest satisfaction from his conformity to the social group, and is attentive to cues of social group values: and (more important) who has aversive feelings if transgresses or he fails to follow social norms, such as would happen if creativity thinking was in play.

And such a person is not creative - because he is focused on learning and doing what the social group wants him to do, and is dominated by such concerns.

*


Note: As described elsewhere, and in line with Gregory Clark's description in A Farewell to Alms - I believe that higher-C, higher-A were positively selected-for in the context of complex agricultural societies - where high-C, high A (and also high general intelligence) were economically useful; and where individuals with high-P traits would have tended to die from starvation or disease - or were differentially killed as being vagabonds, criminals and outlaws.  

Creative is not what you *do*, but who you *are*: the phenomenology of creativity

*

Creative people are made that way: it is personality.

But why? What do creatives get out of being creative?

What, on other words, is the phenomenology of creativity

(Phenomenology = first-person, inner, subjective experience).

*

People could only be creative by disposition if creativity were supported with positive/ rewarding emotions and/or provided relief from negative/ aversive emotions.

I think this works in about three stages:

Discontent -> Delight -> Satisfaction

Corresponding to:

Perceiving a Problem -> Having an Insight -> Generating a Solution 

*

Therefore, creativity is driven by a negative or Dysphoric feeling - that some state of affairs produces an emotion of dissatisfaction.

The creative then turns their attention to this 'problem' - and may come up with an Insight which leads to a Euphoric feeling of delight. So the creative is rewarded up-front for generating insights - whether or not these turn-out to be answers.

Therefore, the creative will tend to generate insights for the sheer fun of it - and even if they turn out to be useless, or harmful.

*

Finally, with luck, the creative comes up with a Solution to the Problem, a Solution which makes him feel Satisfied.

So a state of Discontent has been replaced by a state of Satisfaction - and this can be termed a Euthymic state - that is a state of 'normal' good mood - not Euphoria (which is short term and unsustainable) but a long term gratification.

So, in terms of phenomenology, it goes:

Dysphoria ->  Euphoria - > Euthymia

*

Therefore, for the creative person, being creative is rewarding; and such a person will be creative; spontaneously, whether asked or not, whether useful or not; whether they are sufficiently knowledgeable and competent, or not...

Therefore, if creativity is wanted or needed, then the job requires a creative person.

And if you have a creative person in place, and they are sufficiently interested in what you want them to do, then they will be creative.

Whether this creativity is actually useful in the real world will depend on the degree of correspondence between the creative's internal subjectivity state, and external objectivity.  

*

The (annoying) arrogance of creativity

*

Creativity is a trait: a personality trait.

Therefore, although its overall level and expression can be modulated by self-training and environment - creativity is not something which is switched on-and-off at will: creative people tend to be creative at many or most times and many or most circumstances.

Therefor creative people tend to be creative even when they are too young, too inexperienced, and/or too lacking in knowledge to have any plausible basis for their creativity.

This can be and usually is annoying to those who are older, and do have experience and relevant knowledge (as well as those who do not understand creativity or are hostile to it - and instead want to align with consensus).

*

Creativity tends to go along with the cluster of traits that Eysenck termed Psychoticism

http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/eysencks-personality-trait-of.html

and one of these traits, related to creative genius, is ego-strength, or confidence - or to put it another way: arrogance.

It takes arrogance to look at an established situation and to respond by acting on the assumption that 'I know better' or 'I can do better' (which response is pretty much intrinsic to creativity) and to continue in this way despite inevitable (and quite likely justified) criticism and pressure to stop-messing about and just get on with it!

*

This necessary arrogance is one of the reason why creativity is so often unwelcome, and why it provokes frustration even when it does not provoke outright hostility.

Einstein, for instance, in his later life provoked intense frustration at his refusal to 'get with the program' in relation to the ultimate validity of quantum theory: to persist in criticisms of its tenets, to regard it as merely a temporary expedient.

But this stubbornness of Einsteins in the face of near universal disagreement, was of-a-piece with the creativity which made him great; and most creative people are much less gracious than Einstein, as well as being of much lesser intellectual stature.

Hence, unless we actually want creativity, it tends to be filtered-out by modern, long-haul, multi-level education/ training systems and employment hierarchies.  

What of the Mute Inglorious Miltons? - unacknowledged creativity

*

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway'd,
Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre.

But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page
Rich with the spoils of time did ne'er unroll;
Chill Penury repress'd their noble rage,
And froze the genial current of the soul.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Some village Hampden that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood,
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood.

From Thomas Gray's  Elegy written in a country churchyard

Note: this is a first rate poem - if you do not know it, take a look: http://www.bartleby.com/101/453.html

*

The idea of Mute Inglorious Miltons is intended to convey that creativity, and even creative genius, may have its effects and innovations may result - and yet the creative originator may be unknown and credit misallocated (for example, appropriated without acknowledgement by an uncreative person - or the provenance of the breakthrough simply lost to history) - or else the advance may simply be regarded as an obvious-next-step and taken for granted as having required nothing in the nature of creativity.

*

(Creativity is grossly undervalued by the uncreative - who are, as it were, 'tone deaf' to the operations of creativity. This is possible because creativity usually appears to be wrong, dysfunctional, silly -- and deriving from incompetence, ignorance, craziness, arrogance or some other undesirable trait in the creative person. And of course, more often than not, the products of creativity turn-out to be, indeed, relatively dysfunctional. But when creativity, rarely, leads to an improvement discernible even to the uncreative, then it no longer appears to be a breakthrough but merely a product of common sense.) 

*

But my observations have suggested that only creative people generate innovations, and the majority of people are - in any given context - utterly uncreative and would never innovate, nor even improve (regardless of their intelligence). 

I give two examples of uncreativity from my experience of methods in medicine and laboratory science.

1. Use of alcohol to clean skin before taking blood. When I was taught to take blood, I was told to sterilize the inner elbow with an alcohol swab, then to push the needle through the still wet alcohol in to the vein. This introduced alcohol under the skin where is produced an immediate painful stinging, like a bee sting - and this would be sustained for an hour or so after the blood had been taken.

On enquiry, I discovered that the alcohol could not possibly have any germ killing effect in the few seconds after application, so that it was working merely as a cleaning (not sterilizing) agent, and could (and should!) therefore be rubbed- or wiped-off before inserting the hypodermic needle.

Thereby leading to a great reduction in pain.

So hundreds, thousands of people, on millions of occasions, have inflicted needless pain when taking blood - simply because they were not creative, they were not able or motivated to want to improve the process.

(The same applies to the common but useless and pernicious practice of pressing on the hypodermic needle as it is withdrawn from the vein; thereby scratching the needle tip along the inner surface of the vein;, inducing deep pain of the kind that makes you faint and causing several days of aching.)

*

2. In preparing samples of human brain (post-mortem brain samples, I should make clear!) for the measurement of neurotransmitters, I needed to denature the structural protein of the brain. the approved method did this by 1. adding strong acid and 2. boiling the resultant mixture.

(Denature means to disrupt the 3-D structure of the protein, while preserving its chemical identity - this happens to the albumin when boiling an egg - the clear raw egg 'white' becomes white-and-opaque when boiled. The same effect could be achieved by adding a strong acid, with the obvious disadvantage to subsequent eating.)   

When confronted by the hazardous requirement to boil multiple vessels containing concentrated acid I enquired why it was necessary to do both procedures - adding acid and boiling - when seemingly either of them alone would suffice to denature protein.

I tried the experiment of just boiling the brain (leaving out the acid) and the method worked just as well. So by dropping one step I saved a lot of time, and made the method safer.

But why had so many people been doing it wrong, wasting time, risking accidents - so often for so many years?

Furthermore, it was not necessary to boil the brain, since this kind of protein denatures at about 56 degrees Celsius (quoting from memory) - so I heated the brain to 80 degrees for a time long enough to ensure that it could do its job - and the protein was denatured without inconvenience, mess and hazard of dealing with boiling tubes. 

Now, these modifications I made were not exactly 'rocket science' , but they were instances of creativity in action in an everyday setting - and the necessity for these micro-creative modifications provides examples the very low level of creativity of most people who devise and perform procedures and do things in everyday and institutional life.

*

Furthermore, such exaples of creativity are highly likely to be appropriated without acknowledgment - and this is fair enough, since they are tiny; but this neglect may give the false impression that creativity was not needed for them, that they were merely 'trial and error' of a kind which can simply be taken for granted.

Not so! - even this kind of creativity cannot be taken for granted but depends on specific individuals - albeit such individuals have not all that rare in England in recent years.

But that situation may not apply at all times and places, and sometimes therefore even micro-creativity is lacking in a social situation or a whole society - and then procedures will ossify and become irreversibly degraded with time.

*

Implications of the group selection of genius?

*

Suppose that genius benefits group fitness rather than individual fitness, as seems likely to be the case - then this is a precarious situation.

If genius led to higher fitness, then the proportion of geniuses in a population would increase with each generation. But if genius is group selected then the genetic consequence of a genius is to expand the group - and this rising tide of group fitness will raise the boat of genius.

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/the-reality-of-group-selection-and-not.html

*

A group-selection account of genius therefore (I think) suggests that genius grows in an expanding group, an expanding population - the outcome of genius being the expansion of that population - and the situation can only be sustained if the consequences of that expanding population include maintaining and promoting the causal requisites of more geniuses.

I think it is probably correct that each genius is a one-off - sui generis - not as a matter of necessity, but mostly because of the extreme unlikelihood of the occurrence same combination of abilities and personality factors.

This means that there is NOT a specific and definable 'genius-type' - which further means there cannot be a system for recognizing and promoting geniuses.

*

Which means that genius-type creativity cannot be taught, and can indeed only be described in a broad brush terms.

*

Add to the mix that geniuses are nearly always (not always) troublesome in one way or another - this goes with the territory because even if you cannot say with precision what the genius does do, what he does NOT doe is think like other people - and what kind of personality he does NOT have is one that goes with the flow of social consensus.

*

There are many consequences of this way of understanding genius - and one is that genius is tolerated rather than encouraged - and this especially applies at the local level of the people living around and with the genius - these will experience the problems of genius, but will not benefit from the genius any more than the rest of society.

Since the benefits of genius are general, there is an incentive, therefore, to shift the costs - let someone else, some other group, employ the genius and let them put up with him!

*

Further more, due to the activities of genius, a society, more exactly a human group - that group within which the genius functions - may abruptly switch from being one which tolerates genius for the sake of what he offers, to one which has... well some other attitude that could be actively anti-genius, or merely conformist, or short-termist, or non-functional...

(Non-functional in the sense that what genius offers is ultimately greater functionality, greater efficiency and/or effectiveness at some function - and if a group stops being concerned about functions, then there is no reason to  tolerate genius.)

**

My reason for exploring this point is that at some point in the past few decades, British society went from being one which in practice tolerated genius, to one which is hostile to genius - and this can be seen at almost every level.

To read of such difficult, annoying, disruptive geniuses as Dirac or Wittgenstein, and then to realize that that were Professors at Cambridge - is to recognize that such characters would nowadays get nowhere near a Cambridge chair - not least because actual functional ability is not regarded as of primary importance in modern Britain.

I personally know of examples of supremely able and creative and productive people (as close to genius as we now get) who have been in practice (and for many and various 'excuses') excluded from positions in UK universities - not just once but repeatedly.

Mediocrity is zealously enforced by Head Girl types (of both sexes) whose sole concern is their own social micro-environment.

*

Modern Britain values Leftist ideals far, far more highly than the ability to do your 'job' - and I mean job in the ideal sense of performing a distinctive function.

What happens now is that instead of selecting people on the basis of how they do the job, the job is redefined to include the kind of people you want to select. 

(This is, of course, the bureaucratic way of doing things - in which the bottom line is satisfying other bureaucrats whose bottom line is satisfying other bureaucrats - with bureaucratic 'turtles all the way down' and no bottom line of reality.) 


So, in such a world as modern Britain, why tolerate difficult characters whose 'only' recommendation is that they are supremely good at the real job?

*

Thus a society with a high concentration of effective geniuses flipped quite suddenly into a society which is in practice and almost universally (at the relevant level of effect) actively anti-genius, selecting against genius, excluding of genius.

And the whole thing is denied by the simple expedient of re-labelling: in which some creative nonentity (maybe of high status, or a nutter) is simply stated to be a genius, talked about as a genius - probably given awards and medals for being a genius - and the concept of genius is thereby relativized and even further discredited!

*

The Head Girl Syndrome - the opposite of creative genius

*

The ideal Head Girl is an all-rounder: performs extremely well in all school subjects and has a very high Grade Point Average. She is excellent at sports, Captaining all the major teams. She is also pretty, popular, sociable and well-behaved.

The Head Girl will probably be a big success in life, in whatever terms being a big success happens to be framed (she will gravitate towards such aspects of life) - so she might in some times and places make a Good Marriage and do a great job of raising a family; in another time and place she might go to a top-notch college and get a top-notch job - and pursue a glamorous and infertile lifestyle of 'serial monogamy'; with desirable mates.

But the Head Girl is not, cannot be, a creative genius.

*

Modern society is run by Head Girls, of both sexes, hence there is no place for the creative genius.

Modern Colleges aim at recruiting Head Girls, so do universities, so does science, so do the arts, so does the mass media, so does the legal profession, so does medicine, so does the military...

And in doing so, they filter-out and exclude creative genius.

*

The genius is pretty much everything the Head Girl is not. He is lop-sided in his abilities - truly excellent at some things or maybe just one thing, he is either hopeless or bored by many others. He won't work hard for long periods at things he does not want to do. He will not gravitate to the prestige areas of life, or cannot or will not do the networking necessary to get-on.

*

The Head Girl can never be a creative genius because she does what other people want by the standards they most value. She will worker harder and at a higher standard in doing whatever it is that social pressure tells her to do - and she will do this by whatever social standards prevail, only more thoroughly.

Meanwhile the creative genius will do what he does because he must.

*

The Head Girl will not ever want to alienate potentially powerful allies.

Meanwhile the creative genius is indifferent or hostile to the opinions of others so long as he knows he is right.

*

The Head Girl is great to have around, everybody thinks she is wonderful.

Meanwhile the creative genius is at best a person who divides opinion, strongly, in both directions - at worst often a signed-up member of the awkward squad.

*

The more selective the social system, the more it will tend to privilege the Head Girl and eliminate the creative genius.

Committees, peer review processes, voting - anything which requires interpersonal agreement and consensus - will favour the Head Girl and exclude the creative genius. 

(Not least because committees are staffed by Head Girls, of both sexes, who naturally favour their own kind.)

*

We live in a Head Girl's world - which is also a world where creative genius is marginalized and disempowered to the point of near-complete invisibility.

*

Creative genius probably requires lop-sided cogntive abilities (NOT all round high intelligence)

*

Given that the concept of 'g' or general intelligence breaks down at higher levels of cognitive ability - it is plausible that this may be a factor contributing to the highest levels of achievement which we call creative genius.

What this means is that it is not at all unusual to find that someone who is of exceptionally high intelligence in say mathematics is of only moderately (around average) intelligence in 'verbal IQ' - and vice versa - and it may be these specialists who are most likely to do the highest levels of creative work in their fields - rather than the all-rounders whose different subsets of cognitive ability are all approximately equally high.

Evidence for this comes from the many instances of measured or explicit dissociation between cognitive abilities among those of creative achievement - my favourite example is CS Lewis who was extremely creative, and apparently had an extremely high intelligence of the verbal IQ type -  yet who was only about average in ability in mathematics so that he could not pass the basis 16-plus school examination (O-level) despite several attempts and with private tutoring.

Also, Anne Roe's Making of a Scientist (which is still just about the only thorough intelligence testing of top-notch scientists) shows considerable differences in the average scores of intelligence sub-scales both within and between scientific specialities. These averaged dissociations will have been even more marked, no doubt, at the individual level.

*

But I am perhaps most impressed by my own experience!

I think it is pretty clear (from many experiences, but recently including the breakdown of my IQ test scores for Mensa) that my own intelligence is in the top one percent for verbal IQ but much lower for mathematical and spatial types of intelligence - probably only in the top fifteen percent or thereabouts.

I did get a (top) grade A in O-level mathematics - which would put me in the top few percent, but then O-level mathematics is not very mathematical!

I also got a grade A at A-level (18-plus) physics - which would probably be in the top one percent - but the physics curriculum I studied (The Oxford Examination Board) was designed so that it could be done without A-level maths (as an aspiring medical student I thought it more important to do biology than maths - and I was correct) - and my understanding was therefore achieved by 'translating' physics into a non-mathematical form - which I managed to do, but it was hard work!

*

Later on I developed an interest in Epidemiology - the statistics of medicine and health - and found myself teaching basic statistics and writing papers on epidemiology - and I think I was pretty good at this (although I didn't much enjoy it - It didn't come easily)

Indeed, the highest level of eminence I reached in academia was as an epidemiologist - for example I was twice asked to apply for a Professorship in the subject at University of East Anglia, published a lot including in the top journals in the field and was asked to speak at major conferences.

My point here is that my high and distinctive ability in epidemiology and statistics was not despite my mediocre mathematical skills,but because of them. People in the field who found the maths easy, did not pause to consider the context of that maths, and failed to notice the problems of the way in which mathematics was being applied.

I therefore perceived problems in the mainstream understanding which were real and important - but which were slid-across by the mathematically expert - they whizzed past them so swiftly that they failed to see them.

*

I think my own case is actually an example of the way in which creativity generally works - creativity is a product of friction, and of a distinctive point of view.

Someone who has to translate mathematics into verbal terms is more likely to notice problems and possibilities and to make a distinctive contribution to the subject than is someone for whom it all comes effortlessly.

Clearly high ability of some kind is necessary to this process - but this may be a specific ability with relative weaknesses elsewhere which force the use of that special ability, and problems may yield to one kind of ability but not another.

*

In sum, it is lop-sidedness, the distinctive individual profile of abilities and deficiencies, which may contribute essentially to creative achievement - including that at genius level.

Dishonesty reduces applied intelligence: re-wires the brain

*

Surveying the modern intellectual scene, the world of public discourse among the educational elites, I conclude that dishonesty does not only reduce the efficiency and effectiveness of thinking - but it actually reduces applied intelligence - probably by re-wiring the brain.

*

What I am suggesting is that, although the fundamental efficiency of neural processing is an hereditary characteristic which is robust to environmental differences and changes (short of something like destructive brain pathology - encephalitis, neurotoxin, head injury, dementia etc) - habitual dishonesty (such as is mainstream among the modern intellectual elite) will generate brain changes, and a long-lasting (although probably, eventually, reversible) pathology in applied intelligence - such that what ought to be simple and obvious inferential reasoning becomes impossible.

*

I mean impossible.

Habitual dishonesty (most notable political correctness) is a form of learning; and learning strengthens some brain pathways and brain connections; while allowing other pathways and connections to wither and (perhaps eventually) perish.

Therefore, even on those rare occasions when a typical modern intellectual tries to be honest and to think straight - they cannot do it, because their reasoning processes have been sabotaged by their own repeated habits of dishonesty - their attempts at honest thoughts will be inhibited, and instead channelled down the usual lying pathways...

*

Thus, in modern intellectual life, honesty is punished and dishonesty is rewarded; honest brain pathways decay, dishonest brain pathways enlarge.

After years and years of conditioning in dishonesty, the typical modern intellectual (whether journalist, scientist, lawyer, teacher, doctor or whatever) becomes physically unable to think straight.

Thus the lack of common sense of the 'Clever Sillies' who rule modern societies, and who are driving them into suicide and self-destruction; may, in practice, be intractable - short of mass repentance and long-term rehabilitation and retraining of neural pathways and connections.

*


Reference: Clever Sillies - http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/clever-sillies-why-high-iq-lack-common.html

Is intelligence also personality?

*

In contrast to yesterday's posting, which attempts to differentiate qualitatively between intelligence and personality - with personality being something like the basic nature of the brain/ mind, and intelligence a measure of its efficiency - I am also drawn to the apparently contrary idea that intelligence is (or, at least, can be) personality.

For example, it seems very obvious to me that children of very high intelligence may have a distinctive personality, so tat even from an early age (maybe five?) they are recognizable as 'intelligent' children.

Yet, of course, their actual intelligence is well below the average for an adult in other words their performance of even a top one percent six year old on an IQ test normed for adults (or a measurement of their 'reading age', which is much the same) would place them well below an average 18 year old.

*

What, then, are we detecting in the highly intelligent child?

The usual answer is that we are implicitly comparing the highly intelligent six year old with other six year olds, and are noticing how much more able they are - but I think this is false. I believe that high intelligence can be recognized in a child even when you do not know their age, or even if you believed they were older than their true chronological age - in other words, I think there is a qualitative difference between the personality of the highly intelligent child and average children, which can be detected almost regardless of their actual level of performance.

It is not so much what they can do, cognitively; but the way that they do it - a matter of the mode of thinking rather than the efficiency of the thinking.

Indeed, I believe this is a very strong effect, which is underestimated by the fact that many/ most IQ tests are done against the clock - which underestimates the intelligence of that significant proportion of children with exceptionally high underlying intelligence, but who have sensory, motor, attentional (etc) impairments that reduce their speed/ accuracy of answering.

*

(Contra the received wisdom, I think that very high g has a cost, there is a developmental trade-off between intelligence and - for example, sprinting/jumping/throwing-type athleticism/ dancing/ personal combat ability; thus at the highest levels 'g' is not a reliable fitness marker - probably because of the necessary element of group selection in the occurrence of creative genius.)

*

In a sense, intelligence must, at least at extremes, affect personality; since at a certain point quantitative difference becomes qualitative. Someone with much more rapid processing will perform more processes in the finite available length of time in real world situations - such that the same sensory stimulus will typically lead to a different behavioural response.

*

This kind of difference is seldom measured in the usual psychological studies due to the problem of range restriction in samples - for example the use of college students restricts the range of intelligence to about two standard deviations, towards the upper end of the distribution - while the population as a whole requires four standard deviations to include 96 percent of the range.

Indeed, it is logistically very difficult/ in practice impossible, for most intelligence and personality researchers to sample the bottom of the intelligence range - since they lack access to special institutions and hospitals.

And, further, an institution/ hospital sample will include many with neurological and mental illness, and physical handicaps such that the usual tests will not be possible. In practice it is extremely difficult to sample people of low intelligence who are not also pathological - so the very obvious and characteristic differences in personality between those of very low and very high intelligence may not show up in the usual run of studies.

* 

What is "personality"?

*

This is a tricky question - and one to which I do not have a settled answer. 

But in the classic research programme into interpersonal differences (which was pioneered by HJ Eysenck), personality is regarded as distinct from intelligence. 

This means that ideally there should be no significant correlation between personality and intelligence, but when there is there should be possible significant dissociations - such that high levels of a specific personality trait should be found with both low and high intelligence, with the same applying to low levels of that specific personality trait.

*

How this works can be seen in a draft, in press book chapter on the evolution of Simon Baron-Cohen's concepts of Systemizing and Empathizing (my co-author is Patrick Rosenkranz):


***

Empathizing and Systemizing conceptualized as personality traits

Empathizing and Systemizing are conceptualized as personality traits, dispositions or preferences to behave in certain ways; therefore not as cognitive abilities.

E-S variations are thus not-necessarily correlated with cognitive abilities – and indeed in some studies there is no significant measurable correlation with cognitive abilities. For example, there is neither a strong nor consistent association between the ‘reading the mind in the eyes’ test (a test of a cognitive ability), and scores on a self-evaluation Empathizing scale (a measure of disposition or personality): so that an individual may score highly at reading the mind in the eyes but score low on an Empathizing scale, or vice versa (Lawrence, Shaw, Baker, Baron-Cohen, & David, 2004; Voracek & Dressler, 2006).

 
A disposition is a personality trait: understandable as a sustained tendency, an individual’s characteristic of habitually deploying a mode of cognition. A disposition can also be seen as an individual’s preference for using an ability. (In the sense that preferences can only select between a certain set of abilities; one cannot characteristically be disposed to act in any way that one is incapable of acting.). 

And preference to behave in certain ways is (presumably) based on a motivation, and motivation is associated with a psychological reward (or gratification) from doing something – or else a psychological punishment (or aversive consequence) of not doing something. Ultimately, therefore, a disposition reflects that certain types of behaviour lead to increased gratification (increased pleasure or diminution of suffering). Individuals differ in the types of behaviour which lead to gratification, and in the degree of gratification associated with a specific type of behaviour. 

In sum, individual and groups variations in Systemizing and Empathizing can be understood as variations in the type of behaviour that (on average) lead to gratification. Put simply, Empathizers gain enhanced gratification from Empathizing behaviour, while Systemizers gain enhanced gratification from Systemizing behaviour. For example, a High-Systemizer may have the ability to understand and empathize with other people, but prefers to spend most of his time doing crosswords; while a High-Empathizer may be able to do crosswords to a high standard, but she would prefer to converse with a group of friends. 

Naturally, the disposition to be Empathizing or Systemizing requires that there be the cognitive ability to do these; to empathize requires the ability to empathize and to systemize requires that ability. And at extremes of disposition there may be a deficit in such abilities, so that the extreme Empathizer may be defective in systematizing ability and the extreme Systemizer may be defective in theory of mind ability. 

However, deficiencies in either E or S ability are not necessary to the finding of variations in E-S, and it seems that there may be a wide range of E-S dispositions even when both abilities are fully intact. Therefore, these abilities must have evolved in order that there be a disposition to use them.

***  

If intelligence and personality are regarded as autonomous; then this could be because personality is reducible to something like cognitive structure (maybe even to the formal properties of brain circuitry - the broad systematic principles upon which the brain is 'built')...

While intelligence could be reduced to something like processing speed - the efficiency (including rapidity) of cognitive processing - for instance as (crudely but objectively) measured by reaction times. 

*

On this basis, how might personality be measurable, objectively?

It would ultimately be a matter of how the brain is setup - the principles on which it is organized. 

The idea would be that different personalities would process information differently, according to different principles - and we are talking about qualitative differences, and specifically not about the rapidity of processing. 

So, the same informational input would lead to different behavioural outputs, according to different personalities. 

*

If this analysis is broadly correct, it can be seen why it has proved so much more difficult to measure and in particular to classify personality, than intelligence; since it does not seem obvious why there should be a fixed number of personality types except perhaps at broad categories of gene pools and in response to natural selection.

Much of personality difference would then be random variation, the results of many types of pathology, and the variation due to ongoing, unfinished 'selective sweeps' of natural selection - when past natural selection has produced personality change in a proportion of the population, but either this process is incomplete or else the direction of selection has changed.

*