army1987 comments on 2012 Survey Results - Less Wrong

80 Post author: Yvain 07 December 2012 09:04PM

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Comment author: someonewrongonthenet 09 December 2012 01:03:48AM 3 points [-]

Was Mensa's test conducted on the internet? The internet has a systematic bias in personalities. For example, reddit subscriptions to each personality type reddit favor Introversion and Intuition 4,828 INTJ 4,457 INTP 1,817 INFP 1,531 INFJ

Comment author: [deleted] 09 December 2012 03:50:40AM *  4 points [-]

IAWYC, but "the internet" is way too broad for what you actually mean -- ISTM that a supermajority of teenagers and young adults in developed countries uses it daily, though plenty of them mostly use it for Facebook, YouTube and similar and probably have never heard of Reddit. (Even I never use Reddit unless I'm following a link to a particular thread from somewhere else -- but the first letter of my MBTI is E so this kind of confirms your point.)

Comment author: satt 10 December 2012 12:35:57AM *  0 points [-]

Yeah, different websites have different personality skews, which complicates things. Fortunately there's evidence against Mensa having used an online sample: Epiphany said the results were published in December 1993. It's fairly easy to give a survey to an Internet forum nowadays, but where would Mensa have found an online sample back in '93? IRC? Usenet? (There is a rec.org.mensa where people posted about personality and the Myers-Briggs back in 1993, but the only relevant post that year was someone asking about Mensans' personalities to no avail.)

Comment author: someonewrongonthenet 10 December 2012 01:24:01AM *  -1 points [-]

Yeah...by "internet" what I meant was sites that most people do not know about - sites that you would only stumble upon in the course of extensive net usage. I once described it to a friend as "deep" vs "shallow" internet, with depth corresponding to the extent to which a typical visitor to the website uses the internet. Even within a website (say reddit) a smaller sub-reddit would be "deeper" than a main one.

I'm myself am actually a counterexample to my own "extroverts don't use the internet as much" notion...but I'm only a moderate extrovert. (ENTP or ENFP depending on the test...ENTP description fits better. I listed ENTP in the survey.)

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 10 December 2012 05:38:28AM 3 points [-]

Yeah...by "internet" what I meant was sites that most people do not know about - sites that you would only stumble upon in the course of extensive net usage. I once described it to a friend as "deep" vs "shallow" internet, with depth corresponding to the extent to which a typical visitor to the website uses the internet. Even within a website (say reddit) a smaller sub-reddit would be "deeper" than a main one.

By that definition, there are many nearly disconnected "deep internets".

Comment author: someonewrongonthenet 10 December 2012 07:08:32AM *  1 point [-]

Yes...i'm confused. Is this supposed to be a flaw in the definition? The idea here is to use relative obscurity to describe the degree to which a site is visited only by Internet users who do heavy exploring. There are only a few "shallow" regions... Facebook, Wikipedia, twitter...the shallowest being google. These are all high traffic and even people who never use computers have heard some of these words. There are many deep regions, on the other hand, and most are disconnected.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 11 December 2012 12:48:52AM *  1 point [-]

Yes...i'm confused. Is this supposed to be a flaw in the definition?

It is if you then proceed to claim to have statistics over users of the "deep internet".