daenerys comments on 2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey - Less Wrong

65 Post author: Yvain 03 November 2012 11:00PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 04 November 2012 12:22:57AM 38 points [-]

Took it!

Did any one else have trouble copy-pasting the links?

I normally score insanely high on Openness to experience (says she of the massive amounts of really weird hobbies), but for this test, I scored really low on Openness. Must be feeling particularly close-minded today. Weird.

Comment author: Oligopsony 07 November 2012 03:32:12PM 0 points [-]

Same here on O. I feel like the Openness questions featured a bizarrely high proportion of claims to the effect of "I am a brilliant and original thinker," and despite my attraction to weird ideas (I'm posting here, after all) I don't think I have the evidence to back up an assertion like that.

Comment author: magfrump 06 November 2012 04:06:15AM 0 points [-]

My suspicion is that the openness questions in that test are geared toward people who are also Myers-Briggs S's; I also predict that LWers will be almost entirely N's (50% confidence interval: at least 85% N), and so score significantly less openness.

Comment author: Michael_Sullivan 12 November 2012 03:08:55AM 0 points [-]

I am a massive N on the meyers briggs astrology test, yes I scored 96% for openness on the big-5.

I suspect our responses to questions like "I am an original thinker" have a lot to do with our social context. Right now, the people I run into day to day are fairly representative of the general population with little to skew toward toward the intellectual or original other than "people who hold down decent jobs, or did so until they retired". It doesn't take a great lack of humility to realize that compared to most of these people, I am a brilliant and original thinker.

OTOH, it's not like I'm Feynman or something. If I were working somewhere that filtered strongly for intelligence, like a hot tech startup or academe and had done so for long enough, I would probably feel relatively average and very focused on how to bridge the gap between me and those at the level or two above, vs. a dim awareness of the vast intellectual and originality gap between my associates and the typical person.

Comment author: [deleted] 04 November 2012 07:08:55PM *  2 points [-]

the results of the big five test were highly suspect to me as well.

Comment author: MBlume 04 November 2012 06:56:10AM 4 points [-]

Yeah, wouldn't stay selected.

Comment author: Yvain 04 November 2012 06:09:32AM 7 points [-]

I also got really low openness on that test. I'm suspicious.

Comment author: [deleted] 04 November 2012 03:12:27AM 5 points [-]

Links from Google Forms instructions often don't work, in my experience. They may work in some browsers but not others, and I am sure it does not help that I am often using an iPad for that sort of thing.

Comment author: [deleted] 04 November 2012 02:13:23PM 3 points [-]

Selecting the URL, right-clicking it, and picking “Open in a new tab” worked in my version of Firefox.

Comment author: SaidAchmiz 04 November 2012 07:25:38PM 8 points [-]

In Google Chrome on the Mac, the URL text would simply not stay selected. The moment I let go of the mouse after drag-selecting, the text would un-select, and the question's text field would be focused.

Comment author: thomblake 05 November 2012 05:33:36PM 0 points [-]

Also Chrome on Windows.

Comment author: blashimov 05 November 2012 05:43:56PM 1 point [-]

Yeah, I ended up just selecting to the end of the question: then it stayed selected. I would delete the extra words after copy paste. Obsolete point now probably, but worth looking into for next year.

Comment author: maia 04 November 2012 08:15:34PM 2 points [-]

Had the same problem using Chromium on Ubuntu. I hit Ctrl+C while still holding down the mouse, which worked after a couple of tries.

Comment author: Zubon 04 November 2012 01:44:48AM 1 point [-]

Oh golly, now I feel bad for using my OCEAN score from a recent test rather than re-taking it. This one was atypical? Sorry for adding noise to the data.

Comment author: [deleted] 04 November 2012 02:20:09PM *  3 points [-]

I had recently taken both this one (linked to from here) and the same one as was in the survey, and the scores for all traits were within 6 percentiles of each other. (Stability is the opposite of neuroticism so I should compare N to 100-S, right?)

Comment author: kalium 05 November 2012 07:03:05PM *  0 points [-]

I took both of those too, and for openness I got 74th percentile on the one you linked and 9th percentile on the one in the survey.

Comment author: [deleted] 06 November 2012 12:31:10AM 0 points [-]

To tell the whole story, I took the shorter test (the one in the survey) right after reading the results of the longer test, so priming effect might have caused the results to be closer that they would have been if I had taken the two tests several days apart.

Comment author: gwern 04 November 2012 03:06:25AM 0 points [-]

I reused my scores too. That shouldn't be a problem unless the linked test is weird...

Comment author: Rubix 04 November 2012 01:02:33AM *  4 points [-]

I scored really low on everything - in fact, I got 4th percentile Agreeableness. Not over-correcting for self-importance is hard!

ETA: I do actually have reason to believe that I'm not an extremely disagreeable person; I'm concerned that failing to acknowledge that or present those reasons made it look like I failed to consider that possibility.

Comment author: FourFire 04 November 2012 11:08:49PM 1 point [-]

I got 1th (1st?) percentile on agreeableness, and I disagree! (yes that sounds like High Fallacy) Infact all of my Big Five scores were quite low barring N which was a nicely high number.

Comment author: Nick_Tarleton 04 November 2012 01:07:10AM *  3 points [-]

I got similarly extreme results on C/E/A (not that I disagree with the direction) and lower-than-casually-expected O: link

(Edited to add: Very amused by the Myers-Briggs question "Your actions are frequently influenced by emotions". Um....)

Comment author: [deleted] 04 November 2012 02:29:24PM *  0 points [-]

I feel that my extroversion and agreeableness depend on who I'm with; the test scores were slightly higher than what I'd expect for when I am with average people and somewhat lower than I'd expect for when I am with people who I usually hang around with. (Both Big Five tests I took said I was below median extroversion, but the Myers-Briggs one says I'm E.) My conscientiousness score was somewhat less than I expected (okay, I do tend to procrastinate a lot, but when I do decide to take something as a matter of life and death, I fuckin' take it as a matter of life and death), and my neuroticism score was substantially lower than I expected (which strongly disfavours one of my latest hypotheses about the reasons of my lack of romantic success).