Think of the tests like writing to an advice columnist. The idea is only ostensibly to get advice from the columnist and then obey it. Most people who write to them are just looking for something to react to. The columnist will say "do X", and then the reader will say either "X is exactly right! I should do X, just like the columnist says!" or "No way! That's completely wrong for me! I can't do X - I guess I just have to do Y, then!" But the same reactions would have been possible if Y had been recommended in the first place. The columnist's exact advice only provides a weak impetus towards the recommended action - mostly, it lets you change "decide on what to do" into "agree or rebel".
Well, note that I investigated the questions associated with the language that I did feel applied to me. If none of them seemed right even to a first approximation I would have assumed that the love languages thing didn't make much sense or didn't work for me in particular. My point was that once I've picked one that seems basically right, I don't then cherry-pick subcomponents without a good reason.
The predictions you should make from personality assessments and the like about yourself should be fairly isomorphic to those you'd make about other people upon learning the same data. For instance, if I know someone with a particular Myers-Briggs result, and then I learn that another person has the same one, I will expect a certain level of similarity between the two people on that basis; I should make the same guess if I discover that I have the same Myers-Briggs score as someone I know. Tests themselves often supply predictions, although they're very vague and may require some precisification.
I'll use the love language idea because that's so easy to implement. There's five of them, and while I think there's a test available, it probably doesn't improve much on self-diagnosis. So, I look at the descriptions of the languages, conclude that I'm a "quality time" person because that fits best, and read what it says to expect from myself: Hmm, are distractions, postponed dates, or the failure to listen especially hurtful to me? And then I take off from there. (If I can't easily answer the question or refine my self-model relative to the provided suggestion, I assume that the description is accurate.)
Tips on getting friends/family to provide feedback: I find musing aloud about myself in an obviously tentative manner to be fairly useful at eliciting some domain-specific input. Some of my friends I can ask point-blank, although it helps to ask about specific situations ("Do you think I'm just tired?" "Was I over the line back there?") rather than general traits that feel more judgmental to discuss ("Am I a jerk?" "Do I use people?"). When you communicate in text and keep logs, you can send people pastes of entire conversations (when this is permissible to your original interlocutor) and ask what your consultant thinks of that. If you do not remember some event, or are willing to pretend not to remember the event, then you can get whoever was with you at the time to recount it from their perspective - this process will automatically paint what you did during the event in the light of outside scrutiny.
Let There Be Light
Sequence index: Living Luminously
Previously in sequence: You Are Likely To Be Eaten By A Grue
Next in sequence: The ABC's of Luminosity
Where do you get your priors, when you start modeling yourself seriously instead of doing it by halfhearted intuition?
Well, one thing's for sure: not with the caliber of introspection you're most likely starting with. If you've spent any time on this site at all, you know people are riddled with biases and mechanisms for self-deception that systematically confound us about who we are. ("I'm splendid and brilliant! The last five hundred times I did non-splendid non-brilliant things were outrageous flukes!") Humans suck at most things, and obeying the edict "Know thyself!" is not a special case.
The outside view has gotten a bit of a bad rap, but I'm going to defend it - as a jumping-off point, anyway - when I fill our luminosity toolbox. There's a major body of literature designed to figure out just what the hell happens inside our skulls: it's called psychology, and they have a rather impressive track record. For instance, learning about heuristics and biases may let you detect them in action in yourself. I can often tell when I'm about to be subject to the bystander effect ("There is someone sitting in the middle of the road. Should I call 911? I mean, she's sitting up and everything and there are non-alarmed people looking at her - but gosh, I probably don't look alarmed either..."), have made some progress in reducing the extent to which I generalize from one example ("How are you not all driven insane by the spatters of oil all over the stove?!"), and am suspicious when I think I might be above average in some way and have no hard data to back it up ("Now I can be confident that I am in fact good at this sort of problem: I answered all of these questions and most people can't, according to someone who has no motivation to lie!"). Now, even if you are a standard psych study subject, of course you aren't going to align with every psychological finding ever. They don't even align perfectly with each other. But - controlling for some huge, obvious factors, like if you have a mental illness - it's a good place to start.
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I am not a Starfleet officer. "Sir" is not appropriate.
I don't really like honorifics. "Miss" would be fine, I suppose, if you must have a sir-equivalent.