novalis comments on What is moral foundation theory good for? - Less Wrong

9 Post author: novalis 12 August 2012 05:03AM

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Comment author: novalis 14 August 2012 01:04:14AM -1 points [-]

The impression I get from reading his research is that he came at it from an anthropological background (his advisor, IIRC, was an anthropologist).

My worry is that he is making the same error that early personality tests (Myers-Briggs, for instance) made; yes, they tested something, but not necessarily what they thought they were testing. Statistical tools are more powerful now, but I'm not sure they protect against this sort of error. As others have pointed out, liberals do have a strong sense of the sacred (in the environmental, and in food in particular); Haidt's test doesn't measure this and doesn't have any way of detecting that this is missing.