= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
HughRistik comments on Let There Be Light - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (90)
I'm going to second the recommendation of using psychometrics to further your self-awareness.
As the Wikipedia articles discuss, Myers-Briggs doesn't enjoy a great reputation among psychologists. Nevertheless, the INTP profile describes me, and probably a lot of people here, with freaky accuracy.
The Big Five is a great recommendation. It is very well respected in psychology, and I find especially useful for understanding disagreements with others. There is a big difference between how intelligent people who are low and high in openness view the world. Furthermore, differences in Agreeableness are a big source of interpersonal conflict.
I would stay away from this one. Gardner's notion of multiple intelligences has theoretical problems and does not enjoy empirical support.
For something scientifically validated on how people handle relationships, check out the concept of attachment style. Here's a quiz. I'm convinced that a lot of relationship problems are due to differences in attachment style, rather than one person being in the right and the other person being in the wrong.
Other individual differences that are useful for self-awareness, and understanding how others think differently:
Interests in people vs. things. Richard Lippa's research has shown that this dimension of interests is independent of the Big Five. See this section of his book for more on what the dimension is.
High sensitivity
Self-monitoring
I find the factors for the big 5 a little odd in that they seem to be arranged in clear good/bad pairs, unlike Myers-Briggs which seems to be more arranged as 'not better, just different'. Maybe I'm suffering from some kind of bias but it seems like one would want to score highly on openness, conscientiousness, extroversion and agreeableness and low on neuroticism. They look more like D&D ability scores than alignments.
Attempts have been made to reduce the Big Five into a "Big One", or "General Factor of Personality"(GFP), this correlates the way you describe it. The neurotism is sometimes called Stability, and this together with the other four correlate with one another. Here's a paper by Rushton et al:
(I have low GFP: I'm rather miserable...)
Tangential and nit-picky but this claim bothers me, because I'm guessing when you say "scientifically validated" you mean that somebody did a frequentist analysis of a survey with N=245 and showed P<.05. To an LW reader, it may be obvious that there is a vast chasm between this kind of scientific evidence and the kind that justifies the laws of physics, but the distinction might be lost on the less savvy. Perhaps we should introduce a set of words capable of expressing the difference.
"The Cult of Statistical Significance" suggests that we're looking for tests that display power rather than significance.
It is also interesting to note that everyone I've met who is involved with Less Wrong is an xNxx, the vast majority being xNTx. Predictably, INTP is the most common.
I'm an ISTJ.
I am pleasantly surprised. Given an "SJ" rating for a handle that I am familiar with I would expect to have a negative association with the handle. Yet I don't in this case. You do the "SJ"s proud!
What consequences does this have for the Less Wrong community? Are we missing out on something because we don't have more personality types here?
I think it depends on what the test is actually measuring - and the phrase 'personality type' doesn't seem to be descriptive enough to be useful in determining that.
If my earlier 10-second assessment turns out to be right, and the test is measuring which types of bias people are most prone to, then a high overlap in 'personality types' could be an indication that the people here tend to have significant shared blind spots and thus a lower-than-ideal chance of noticing them in each other. If it's measuring something that's not relevant to rationality, I don't think the overlap matters, but I'd also be somewhat surprised to see a high overlap in test results in that case: I don't predict that the people here have a high level of similarity in results on the love style test, because affection-awareness isn't something that's relevant here in any way that I can see, but people who are interested in rationality but prone to different biases, and less prone to the (hypothetical) set that we share, would probably not stick around in a place that has flaws that are obvious to them, so selection bias seems relevant in that case, and would have the observed result.
Of course, it could also be that 'personality type' somehow results in more or less interest in rationality, rather than being caused by something that's relevant to rationality. Figuring out what the test is actually measuring should hopefully clear that up. (I suspect that the kind of selection bias that I mentioned does happen, though, even if it's not related to the MB test - I follow the blogs of several people online who are interested in rationality in completely different ways than we are here, and who I predict would feel quite unwelcome here for reasons that are only tangentially related to actual quality of thought.)
I am interested. Could you give some examples of those blogs, and possibly describe in what way their approach is completely different?
I don't think just linking to the blogs would be useful, and I predict that it'll take a thousand words or more to explain what aspects of them I'm referring to - for one thing, I'm using a rather broader (but in my experience, more useful) definition of 'rationality', which I'd need to explain. I'll work on it.
Do you still hold these ideas? Have you managed to work them out in detail in the meantime?
I'm ieNTP; I fall on the exact center of the introvert/extrovert spectrum, but if I had to pick one it would be E.
Where's everyone getting their results from? I had the test properly administered once (I had a temp job as a student for a day being a guinea pig for people learning to administer the test) and I think I've taken it online at some point but I don't remember the results. I just found a free online test through Google and got ENTP but I don't know how reliable a random online automated test is. The 'official' Meyers Briggs page seems to suggest that you have to pay a trained professional to administer the test to get 'correct' results. I remember getting the distinct impression of a somewhat dubious money making scheme when I did my day as a guinea pig.
I once again had the problem I mentioned elsewhere taking the online test just now that I really struggle to answer the questions. Very few of them have a clear answer for me and most I could feel comfortable answering either way so I feel like I'm more or less picking at random. Maybe it is supposed to all come out in the wash.
We can test this...
We should probably compare with the same online test. Would you mind linking to it?
Don't forget to put links to the karma-balance in the poll questions.
This was the online test I used. There may be better ones out there, this was just the first free one I found through Google.
If you took the online test and it doesn't match your professionally-administered test, vote this up.
(karma-balancer)
Got INFJ from the online test, the one I got in 2003 was INTP. Strength of the preferences from the online test were 11/62/12/33. I can't find the professional test.
It might be worth considering what answers you give now that might be different than ones you gave 7 years ago. I know I took one of these back in college, and probably every 5 years or so I've revisited it, each time never recalling my previous result (what does THAT say about my personality?).
But it struck me this time that some answers I gave this time would have been different 5 years ago. Enough that I probably would have been rated a different alphabet.
For the record: ENFP (slight, distinct, moderate, slight).
Like the sun over course of the day, our luminousity and spectrum change over time, from the blue tints of dawn to the harsh light of day, and again the blues towards dusk if I recall correctly, followed by gruesome darkness.
Anyway forgive my lyricism, but you catch my drift (although some claim that people never 'fundamentally' change, I disagree).
I wonder if there's a way to measure how an individual is trending over the years, probably by comparing a series of tests over the years (although I think the act of taking thr tests repeatedly would tend to increase introspection, in the manner of observation effecting the outcome).
I took the test this morning and was amazed that I was assigned ESTJ, which is very far from what I was assigned 5 years ago (ENFP). I decided that while the discrepancy could be due to the online test being poor (I self-identify much more with being ENFP), it's also quite possible that I've changed. I noticed that the questions were worded more along the lines of what do you do verses what your preferences are, and the truth is that since becoming a mother I've had to restructure my life a great deal away from my original preferences. I spend all day every day being a "guardian", so perhaps it's not so surprising my personality test results would change to reflect that.
Up to this point, in the thread, there have been 2 possible explanations given for why a 5-year old professional exam has different results than a current online one:
-personality changes over a long time-scale (5 years, etc)
-scoring differences between professionals and automated counters.
These two explanations seem based on the assumption that the responses given to the individual questions are only determined by the responder's "personality." That is: person A, having personality x, will always give answer a1, s.t. if A (under reliable test conditions) gives answer a2, A must not have personality x.
I've only just now tried this test, but I at least found questions where my answer could have been either True or False, depending on the moment. (ie, "Your workspace is clean and organized," the answer of which will vary depending on my proximity to deadlines.)
If we're discussing tests, I propose that we need a control, where we take the online exam multiple times over a sufficiently small time-scale that we do not expect our "personalities" to have dramatically shifted. That is: once a day, at various hours, for a week.
If the control tests have similar results, then we can go back to our question of "what changed between 5 years and now." But, if these control tests have differing results (I'm not sure what significance condition we should set), then we should probably assume that the test may not be a "personality" test, but a "state of mind" test given "personality" and "external conditions." In that case, we may want to be suspicious about self-evaluating with these tests.
If I have time (and remember) to take this control myself, I'll post the results. 17/9/11 -> 10:30 -> ISTJ (22/62/12/22)
It may also just increase the "ability" of taking the test such that it produces outcomes that match better with your (desired) self-perspective. I've noticed a slight drift from INTP to INFP (which I identify with a bit more) in repeated self-administrations of the test. Possibly that's just due to how I feel on a particular day, but partly I may be choosing answers which favor F over T without outright lying in cases where I am not very sure.
If you took the online test and it matches your professionally-administered test, vote this up.
(karma-balancer)
karma-balancer
I had the test administered by a "certified" assessor, but as the venue was the AYE conference it kind of came free with attendance.
I tested as (surprise, surprise) INTP, although from having had previously used online tests I'd self-identified as INTJ.
I'm the same, and yes, it's supposed not to matter. I'd agree with Ben that the test isn't necessarily much more rigorous than a horoscope, but I also agree with Alicorn that the point is more to raise awareness about the existence of more modes of being than the one you're most familiar with. It's a good antidote to generalizing from a sample of size one.
Mine was in a leadership seminar I took in college. They paid the Myers Brigg IP owners and we got glossy pamphlets; I don't remember how the test was actually administered. On that test I was +1 towards the E, but it would go back and forth depending on my mood.
I don't think a professionally administered Myers Brigg test is better than an online one, but it's quite possible that some or most online versions have different questions than the real one.
I have a distinct memory of being asked if I was afraid of snakes in the face-to-face test (it stuck out because it seemed so out of place) which wasn't in the online version I just did. There was indeed a glossy pamphlet at the end of the day.
I was only just E on the online test and I got the impression that some of the questions I found particularly difficult to answer were the primarily E/I questions.
The test I took was a group test, I think we wrote down our answers while the questions were being read to all of us and then scored them ourselves. I don't remember a question about snakes or anything about fear. I took the test in 2006.
I took the test over 10 years ago so I only have marginal confidence in my memories of it but the snake question stood out at the time and it seems an odd detail to confabulate out of nowhere so I am inclined to think the memory is probably genuine. It is entirely possible there is some cross-contamination of the memory from elsewhere however.
I have a half memory that the snake question may have been part of some kind of calibration process where the interviewer got the interviewee in the habit of answering questions quickly with their 'gut' response and not hesitating or deliberating over the question too much. That is an even less reliable memory than the snake question however.
Wow, that is scary. I read about attachment style, and it was eerie how well it described my relationship.
EDIT: Actually, I think I would really appreciate if anyone had any interesting sources on attachment styles in adults.
Freaky indeed. I'm familiar with Myers briggs and usually get IN(T|F)P on tests but that description was remarkably insightful.