I have a hard time with psychology as a science, it was showed many studies were not reproducible. I like psychology, but studying success and finding that discipline=success really seems like using some layman vocabulary to tell people the source of why they're unsuccessful in life, which reminds me of motivational speaking, which I despise with passion. Diagnosing people with lack of discipline is more a questions of morals, ideology of life and philosophy than science. It's not something you can do or do with results, and often it will just be about motivational speaking, which is often scamming.

Conscientious people also often are conformists, which to me is not a good thing.

"Big Five personality traits" and the HEXACO models seems like pseudo science to me, because I don't think you can precisely define those things with a study of behavior, and come with relevant and applicable notions of those metrics.

We are in an age of the study of AI, and psychology sounds like it's the alchemy of the study of the brain. It might work in some places, but I don't think we can rely on it. Worse, I hardly think you can use psychology in a thoughtful process of helping people without sounding like a madman.

No, people are not ignorant simply because they disagree with you or use different and perfectly applicable terms. The might think the topic is much bigger than its field of study, though.

> For starters, this is about psychology not sociology.

It's both. How humans are educated is absolutely sociology and most psychological topics relate to sociology some way or another since it's basically impossible to separate humans from their society. This is really not the point you should have went with if you wanted to score points calling someone ignorant.

> The big five and intelligence are the only measurable qualities that been used consistently and over time to make predictions.

You consider the Big Five acceptable because you are comparing it to other psychological models, but that's not the standard. The standard is in the hard sciences. This is not overwhelming evidence. This is "it's all right", maybe "it's better than nothing". The theory of evolution has overwhelming evidence.

These is not trivial conclusions that are being made here. The conclusions that are made from things like Big Five will affect our schools, our workplaces, our governments, our lives. It needs to be rock solid if it's to be bought as dogma. It's not sufficient for it to be better than the rest, or occasionally be predictive. The "evidence" for Big Five is hugely reliant on self-evaluations.

You're deriving "Any form of achievement in life requires discipline" from something that's mostly correlation, and you're using two term sets that are imprecisely defined: "achievement" and "discipline". How can there be overwhelming evidence for something so imprecise? How much discipline does a given person have? How does this interact with things like "grew up poor" or "had poor nutrition"? How much achievement is achievement? Is a happy person with 2 kids more achievement than a person with a 180k job? A study can look at one or the other but can it tell me who has more achievement? "There's mostly a positive trend between this thing and this other stuff" is not "overwhelming evidence".

Pretty much all our measurements of achievements and conscientousness correlate heavily with "acceptable and equipped for present society". Conscientousness is beneficial in a world where it's important to show up on time so you don't get fired and keep track of 30 different bills. Big surprise. What about a society where these things are not that important? Oh, wait, we don't have one. Put this in the bucket where larks are happier than night owls. How is this glaring problem with these styles of observations not obvious to you?

This is the entire problem with sociology, and, yes, I say sociology, because the problem with pretty much all psychology is that it forgets it's also pretty much always sociology.

> You also don’t seem to even know what conscientiousness is.

Here's the thing: terms like discipline or grit are much older than the Big Five model. "conscientousness" is not really a term people would use but that's effectively what it is a proxy for. But the term you used is "discipline". People are not obliged to use the Big Five's specific definition. Discipline is extremely strongly associated with conformity and authority obedience in human cultures. The topic of this discussion is about discipline instilled in education, a very authoritative environment. Another one that comes to mind is military. There's going to be a relationship there and your studies won't be able to get rid of it.

> It can be broken down further into subcategories if orderliness and industriousness. Neither of those qualities are related to “obedience to authority”. Agreeableness is, but agreeableness is an entirely different personality trait. Industrious people are often very disagreeable.

It's not really entirely different, it's been bucketed under a general "Stability": https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019188690...

One of the criticisms of Big Five is that it overlaps with itself a lot: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019188691...

It seems strange to say that a given factor is "entirely different" for a model known for its overlap. It seems further strange to get attached to specifics here when there are different styles of splitting up the model and when there are preexisting definitions of terms like "discipline".

> This isn’t some flash in the pan pop-science

Except it is. Google conscientiousness, grit, etc., and see how many articles will pop up. It's all the rage right now, and has gotten popular mostly due to a mix of influences Gardner and Dweck, the studies from both of which are very suspect. It's not really Big Five that made it popular.