2017 Personality 18: Biology & Traits: Openness/Intelligence/Creativity I
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended as a solid introduction to personality and IQ research, and cited as the source for factor-analysis claims about personality and intelligence.
What it is
A Jordan Peterson university lecture on the Big Five trait openness to experience, covering creativity and intelligence. It explains how IQ is measured, how well it predicts life success, and the Pareto distribution of creative output.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2017 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec sho · 2017-04 · on “IQ and the Job Market (Jordan Peterson) [video]”
This is just a clip from the full lecture here: [this video] If you like the clip, watch the whole thing. It's great.
Recommends mudita · 2021-02 · on “In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)”
Let's hear it from a psychologist: "If you don’t buy IQ research, you might as well throw out all the rest of psychology." (Jordan Peterson) [this video] For anybody interested in personality research, I warmly recommend this lecture series, by the way. These are the basics, which psychology students learn at university.
Cites bofadeez · 2025-08 · on “University of Cambridge Cognitive Ability Test”
This is a talking point from an old university class lecture interpreting factor analytic data on personality and IQ [1]. In practice, intelligence tests don’t depend on the specific questions asked. If you let a group of people generate their own items, pool them together, sample randomly, and then rank scores, the same individuals would tend to rise to the top. The high IQ people would cluster toward the top with a correlation of 0.9. This is because people with higher general cognitive ability perform better across virtually any cognitive task, a phenomenon first documented by Spearman (1904) and repeatedly confirmed in psychometrics research (e.g., Jensen 1998; Deary 2012). [1] [this video]
Cites bofadeez · 2025-08 · on “University of Cambridge Cognitive Ability Test”
If you dismiss IQ research, you might as well disregard all of psychology. The psychologists who developed intelligence tests were pioneers in using the statistical methods (e.g. factor analysis) that now underpin the entire field. IQ is defined more precisely than almost any other psychological construct. Discarding it leaves you with poorly defined concepts and no clear way to handle them. [1] [1] [this video]