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Blueberry comments on On Enjoying Disagreeable Company - Less Wrong
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I've yet to see a test that avoids this problem. I really don't understand why tests like this and the Aspergers one, which will obviously vary dramatically with your moods, are considered to have any meaning at all.
Psychologists tend to treat a test as having meaning when it has some form of 'validity', 'validity' being the catch-all name for the different ways a psychologist might assess if a test looks meaningful. For example, some Big Five personality scores correlate with things like job performance, suggesting predictive validity. Whether this kind of validation can prove that a test has meaning will hinge on what you feel it means for a test to have meaning.
In that case we should probably taboo "meaning" (in this context) and talk directly about whatever it is we want a test to do — make clinically useful predictions, carve reality along its natural joints, etc.
Strangely enough, I'd only considered the 'validity' side - basically are the categories used universal? Somehow missed how biased self-reporting might be.