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A comment on Why It Pays to Be a Jerk. Parent comment

Re:Why It Pays to Be a Jerk by vasilipupkin on Sunday May 31, 2015 @11:46PM (#9636713)
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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Re:Why It Pays to Be a Jerk by vasilipupkin on Monday June 01, 2015 @12:08AM (#9636759)
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
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Re:Why It Pays to Be a Jerk by krick on Monday June 01, 2015 @12:41AM (#9636832)
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.
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Re:Why It Pays to Be a Jerk by malka on Monday June 01, 2015 @05:27AM (#9637485)
if you have a correlation between A and B, and a correlation between B and C, then A and C are correlated.
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Re:Why It Pays to Be a Jerk by chengsun on Monday June 01, 2015 @06:23AM (#9637624)
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.

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Re:Why It Pays to Be a Jerk by malka on Monday June 01, 2015 @08:06AM (#9637938)
Oh. True, thanks for the explanation :)
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Re:Why It Pays to Be a Jerk by gd1 on Monday June 01, 2015 @04:52AM (#9637391)
>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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