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Comment by vasilipupkin | Hacker News Reader

Certain qualities like narcissism are not measurable precisely, so he created the next best thing, which is precisely defined according to a formula, and, hopefully, correlates highly with true narcissism. This is exactly how do you social science research

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for example, if you wanted to do research on whether or not smarter CEOs increase shareholder value, how would you go about it ? Intelligence is hard to measure, but we know things like test scores correlate with it to some degree. So, maybe, you would see how well companies do against CEO SAT scores or undergraduate institution they attended or their high school gpa

Then you have to admit that measuring correlation between "smarter CEOs" and "shareholder value" is impossible and measure correlation between "CEO SAT scores" and "shareholder value" instead. Yeah, not that click-baity, but that would be a real study, unlike this one.

if you have a correlation between A and B, and a correlation between B and C, then A and C are correlated.

This is not true in general.

Consider two independent fair die rolls, with A and C being the outcomes. Let B be the sum of the outcomes. The higher A is, the higher B is likely to be, so A and B are positively correlated. So are B and C. However there is no correlation between A and C as they are independent.

Oh. True, thanks for the explanation :)

>which is precisely defined according to a formula, and, hopefully, correlates highly with true narcissism.

Yeah, that was his point. Hope doesn't cut it. You kind of have to go off and prove your formula does correlate highly with true narcissism, not just skip on to the next step.

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