I remember in the late 90s and early 2000s twice taking paid training courses that used the DISC model, another one that was then popular.

These of course more personality modeling and behavioural typing, or out and out “how to read people and manipulate them” efforts, rather than efforts to define reason. But definitely in the same wheelhouse as Big Five. Big Five appears to be the most popular today. It’s certainly popular with the rightthinkers, too. It’s a pretty good tool for self-examination as long as it doesn’t start to define the world.

OCEAN

-Openness
-Conscientiousness
-Extroversion
-Agreeableness
-Neuroticism

The “Big Five” personality traits I mentioned in our discussion of IQ etc.

I love the list. I am adding it to my library where I keep my aide memoir of logical fallacies and similar things.

I am very relieved to find that I can apply most of them to myself, although what you said about clever traps by the monkey brain applies.

I commented on a different thread that I like the commentary of Gwynne Dyer, because his opinions on a subject were not predictable, and I saw that as the sign of an actual thinker.

You list works to illuminate that ides.

Ideas are messy and contradictory, and one of the very irritating thing about the current political and cultural orthodoxy, is its predictability. Talk to a “woke” person about any topic, and you can predict within a minute of two, what heir “opinion” (I use the term loosely), what heir opinion will be on ANY topic.

A truly interesting person will have doubts and contradictory opinions, heterodox, as you put it.

This is not an easy thing at all.

That OCEAN acronym, though… I think I recognize it, but I can’t put my finger on it. Where does that come from?

It’s a partial list of my own.

I started to think about heuristics that could be useful in checking for self-serving bias, that would be resistant themselves to being captured by the monkey brain.

Of course, they may themselves be the artefact of a particularly clever trap set by my monkey brain.

Is that list your own? It’s quite good and rightly challenging, probably for all.

By way of reassurance that we might not be completely screwed, I offer the following heuristics for auto-sphinxing.

1. You have changed your mind about 1 or more important thing in the last few years, on the basis of better evidence or argument.

2. You are genuinely uncertain of the facts or ethics of an important issue.

3. You wish that a lot of what you believe to be true, wasn’t.

4. You have a conscious ethic, and are aware of incompleteness/problems with it.

5. You views don’t neatly align with any large social movement; there’s an element of heterodoxy.

6. You enjoy arguing, and hearing a novel and well-constructed argument you haven’t encountered before.

7. You have high openness and low agreeableness (OCEAN).

“I have taken a long time to get to the idea that there is no such thing as a rational/logical end, save that it is merely a means that actually serves some higher end, in which case the eventual ultimate goal will be pre-rational. Even survival, which for some is the definition of a rational goal, and I can see that as a plausible axiom, is really a bio instinct.”

Everybody’s pet belief/value/identity/cause is rational to them. I’ve been and will be again guilty of it too. But arguing otherwise gets things going.