cupholder comments on On Enjoying Disagreeable Company - Less Wrong

49 Post author: Alicorn 26 May 2010 01:47AM

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Comment author: cupholder 07 June 2010 02:43:55AM *  2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: ata 07 June 2010 04:42:33AM 2 points [-]

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.