Nornagest comments on SotW: Be Specific - Less Wrong

38 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 03 April 2012 06:11AM

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Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 04 April 2012 02:15:31AM *  4 points [-]

"Read through the comments, gather the LessWrong usernames of everyone who made a suggestion we tried or adopted, and email the list to Luke"

It's pretty easy to just let Luke do everything isn't it? (No snark meant; I noticed this tendency in myself when we were housemates and started actively trying to fight it.)

Exercise

It seems possible that when people take personality tests, they just write down their perceptions of themselves. A much better way would be to think of specific examples (of times when they were on time or late for an appointment, for instance). Maybe if you got people to tally up specific examples, they would get a result the genuinely surprised them. Instructing people to search for examples in a way that didn't favor their preconceptions could improve results even more.

Reasons this idea could be good: personality tests are inherently interesting, and they are a fairly emotionally neutral discussion topic that doesn't risk excluding anyone. (If you started asking folks to brainstorm reasons why they were or were not a diligent employee, you might run into some problems.) You could even brand it as being an unusually accurate way to administrate a personality test.

Phil Goetz on personality tests:

[The main advantage of Myers-Briggs] is that it manages to classify people without insulting them. (This is accomplished by confounding dimensions: Instead of measuring one property of personality along one dimension, which leads to some scores being considered better than others, you subtract a measurement along one desirable property of personality from a measurement along another desirable property of personality, and call the result one dimension.)

http://lesswrong.com/lw/14x/the_machine_learning_personality_test/

This is a point against my idea if all the scientifically validated classification systems, like the Big Five, run the risk of insulting people.

Comment author: Nornagest 04 April 2012 02:55:55AM 0 points [-]

A much better way would be to think of specific examples (of times when they were on time or late for an appointment, for instance).

This risks running into salience issues. Events which lead to failure or loss of status tend to be a lot more salient than those which lead to success, and while that by itself could still give you a reasonable if upsetting metric, I don't see any obvious way to control for differences in how this tendency manifests, or for differences in salience between domains (which could paradoxically lead to overweighting failures in a domain the testee considers personally important). Differences in general recall ability would also weight the results, but you could probably control for that with some extra effort.

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 04 April 2012 04:16:22AM 0 points [-]

You could probably fix these problems by specifically asking for recent examples, in the last few weeks. Also, note I might've picked an unusually upsetting personality question. If upsetting participants is a significant issue, choosing questions and personality metrics carefully could ameliorate things.

Also note that accurate personality assessment is not the primary goal here. In theory, it could be a good exercise even if it doesn't provide accurate personality assessment.

In fact, you could even discard scientific pretense altogether, and just have participants complete one of those "Which Harry Potter character are you?" type quizzes, but thinking of specific examples.

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