The scary thing is a lot of commercial "people analytics" systems marketed to HR departments, lenders, and government agencies are little more than dressed up relationship tests from 1980s magazines.
https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/talks/MIT-STS-AI-snake...
The main useful thing about this sort of thing, including the more modern Tilt 365 for example, is that it can be a useful exercise in helping people understand that the way they think about and approach the world differs from how others do.
Years ago, I remember a book (Tog on Interface) that had a chapter which discussed how Apple engineers tested on MBTI versus the general population. He went to discuss implications for how it was easier for engineers to have mental models for how systems operated than users. Was this a correct explanation based on MBTI? Who knows. But it was a useful reminder in this case that your users may not be like you.
I will code switch between star signs and personality acronyms to get in your pants and assign zero weight to either
You charmer, you.
I dont lie about my astrology signs or myer briggs result
I judge which one will likely help create an intimate consensual scenario and judge when to avoid criticizing either school of thought as disagreement is usually counterproductive to a consensual reproductive scenario
Pick your battles wisely
Out of even more adaptive curiosity, how do you read that as lying?
I guess it comes from the goal you are trying to achieve.
But I’ll probably be knowledgeable about the value system
We’re on to love languages now too right
Controversial, but also true, is that I get the same response trying to debunk diversity hiring etc. because I happen to be a white, straight male. I am also practically blind in one eye and grew up poor, but I refuse to play the victimhood game or even agree to that frame to win an argument. Also I don’t want to get into the pros and cons of that topic in this thread as that’ll inevitably be a train wreck as always, but I just want to point out how frustrating it is to “lose” an argument because of who you are, not what you actually say. Also, for the diversity people, it’s super insulting to essentially suggest “you’re only disagreeing to protect your own race”. I honestly think the appropriate response is to tell them to fuck off after they bring up your race, gender, sexuality, etc. in an argument.
I agree though and simply say its not my trading strategy.
But, seriously, IMO, to the extent that technical analysis "works," it's probably just exploiting short term momentum. Momentum strategies have been shown to generate alpha. Other than that, you'd probably be just as well off reading tea leaves and goat entrails to guide your trading strategy.
It’s just easier to get there when you use a disguised relationship tests from 1980ies magazines. Not only does it touch on relevant areas, most people that you’d use the HR resources on secretly love taking those things and then talking about themselves.
As with most things, it can obviously go wrong or get used in the wrong situations. HR is a department that’s there to help managers, but they really shouldn’t waste their resources testing people for a position as a software developer. If your company is doing that, something went wrong. Maybe HR found a way to keep themselves busy, or you’re not bolstering a management culture or people who can make hiring related decisions without consulting HR.
It’s not an insignificant amount of resources you put into the process. Not only do you take up HR resources, the team that is helping you recruit is also going to need to spend time going over the results with HR and the candidate.
In my optics that is an unnecessary waste of resources. Not only doesn’t the process really show you anything team-related, you should frankly be capable of judging people from the conversations you have with them just as well.
The in-depth personality stuff only gets relevant when the people you hire have to manage other people.
I agree that the battery of tests used should not be the same in every case. It should be tailored to the situation and to the position you are hiring for.
> Not only do you take up HR resources, the team that is helping you recruit is also going to need to spend time going over the results with HR and the candidate.
I have second-hand experience that this can be made very streamlined and does not take much time at all. Especially when you have a large number of prospective candidates and will not be able to see them all in person, a pre-filtering done by a skilled HR person is better than a random draw.
But I guess this means HR shouldnt skill-test anyone. We d all agree they shouldn't test a racecar driver, a CEO, a mathematician.
But the guy saying that probably doesnt work: HR never test anyone. They handle the process. He may be confusing it with wrong job posting that people attribute to HR (like N years xp in N-5 years old tech) which are usually the product of idiotic managers, not HR who doesnt give a fig what your team needs as long as you express it to them.
Maybe we have different ways of defining things, or maybe my English isn’t good enough to convey the meaning.
But isn’t HR handling the process of personality testing, HR testing people? When we utilise personality testing, a HR consultant actually tests the candidates. It’s their test, they spend millions developing it and you have to be certified to perform it.
That is, if I saw the two cups in my example naturally I'd say the obvious one holds more water, but often there'd be no point in putting it as a survey question if the obvious answer was the case. Therefore I'm almost sure the correct answer is the seemingly wrong one.
So I put that as the answer and get it right. But for whoever's running the survey, I'm probably messing up their results by meta-analysing the questions.
One or ours was deliberately set up so that prospect hires applying for a leadership position would end up with very, very, little in their empathy score if they chose answers that sound like the “right” ones for a leadership position. It was done to catch people off guard in their next interview, and see how they handled getting shown a result they’d very likely not agree with.
HR departments know these things are bullshit. They know people game the systems, exactly like people practice for the coding interview. The test and the results are often extremely irrelevant to anyone getting hired, it’s how people handle their results that’s important.
The entire branch of team-building/personality matching/management consulting/management training/management network facilitating is a fat unnecessary cow that enterprise organisations will never get rid of because they are very good at being “people skills” and positioning themselves with top management.
After a year of lockdowns, where they’ve been completely unable to execute their regular function, their absence have left no mark on our organisation though.
Whether or not their HR department is ran by a licensed phrenologist is a distant second concern.
So this isn't tautological in the way that you've described, though it is certainly related to the way human beings describe each other and the way that instantiates in human language.
Source 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_hypothesis
Source 2: I'm a psychologist and did research in this area
Modern personality theory DOES. Personality theory uses a variety of techniques to show that a construct is internally consistent and related to real-world indicators. If independent people can view a video or a person and they reliably rate that entity similarly (inter-rater reliability), we can say with some certainty that there is something there. Relating a construct like this to a variety of real-world outcomes allows us to ascertain its relationship to the world. This evidence is messy and not nearly as solid as what's found in the harder sciences, but your dismissal of the modern statistics of questionnaire-based measurement does a very well-researched field of inquiry a huge disservice.
There’s a giant chasm between “I have a signal” and “here’s what that signal means”. You can’t start out with a data set, pick out some signals and then say what they mean. That’s scientific theory 101. You build a hypothetical model and then design experiments to test those theories. It’s not me doing the field a disservice. The practitioners have consistently and repeatedly done bad science and statistics. I’ll be more supportive once the field actually starts producing falsifiable theories that are supported by evidence and the practitioners are better at calling out their peers.
Acupuncture, which is having someone dancing around you while touching you, is like everything: find something cheaper and more efficient to solve the same problems and we wont see it anymore.
I've seen how large companies make ≈$X0 million decisions and probably $X00 million decisions and I suspect $ billion decisions aren't treated fundamentally differently. I wouldn't use that as evidence for how to make decisions well.
My current theory is that companies are successful not because they consistently make specific tactical or even strategic decisions well but because (through design or evolution) they are resilient systems that can weather surprisingly poor decision making at all levels.
The problem still remains of how the physical measurements (even assuming we could measure them perfectly, which we definitely can't) relate to the internal experience.
Any real theory of psychology/neuroscience needs to be able to explain that, and currently I'm not aware of any that do.
> Psychology and psychiatry really do struggle to demonstrate statistically meaningful results behind most therapies (CBT is perhaps a notable exception, although even there results can be mixed)
So it's incredibly difficult to do good studies of therapy, because there is no simple placebo. All of the research I've seen suggests that there's huge amount of provider-level variance, which swamps the theoretically meaningful defences. I would suggest that this is because we don't really have a good understanding of how to interrogate our own (or others) psyches, which is definitely not something that neuroscience will help with (given the current state of the field, at least).
In fact, they liked it so little that they invented Procrustean rotation so that they could make the factors come out the "correct" way.
Once I discovered that, I paid a lot less attention to the Big 5.
Also, I haven't checked the source papers, but that all blue stuff could come from a general tendency to agree with the questions/put a positive spin on that. I do know that not all personality measures are balanced on positive vs negative questions, to remove this bias (life satisfaction methods are almost certainly not balanced in this way).
You might have Personality Descriptive Adjective X that is found to cluster into what we call a Big Five trait.
But Adjective X has its own definition, and it's likely that the tautology (at least insofar as these life satisfaction correlations are concerned) happens at that level.
Instead, they literally ask people hundreds of questions of the type:
"To what extent would you consider yourself to be [adjective]?" (0 - 'not at all' to 5 - 'complete')
Then they factor analyze the results to see which adjectives tend to be highly related to each other. Factor analysis builds on correlation to find shared variation among large groups of indicator variables.
So it is related to how people think of the adjectives and what they mean, but it is not the case that we are just lumping definitions together or "saying the same thing in different words" in the way of a tautology. Instead, what we're saying is that "Most of these personality adjectives mostly mean the same thing. Here's the thing they all mostly mean. If humans in all languages have tons of words that mostly mean this common thing, maybe this common thing is significant and worthy of study."
Regarding life satisfaction, the sense that one finds their life satisfactory and "would change nothing" (one of the items in the Satisfaction with Life Scale that was most likely used to measure it) doesn't show up in those other traits in any major way. In fact, to the extent that a description of the self is related to a world-view, belief or other external factor, it will never be a tautology, because a self-view and other-view or world-view will never share a common definition or tautology by virtue of the self-other distinction.
The big problem with these results (and god knows I've analysed enough of them) is that the extent that they map to other characteristics measured without surveys is pretty much unknown.
If you want to create a new measure of extraversion, then you use the older methods (i.e. other surveys), and this only really tells you that the new measure correlates with the old.
I vaguely recall Eysenck doing physiological tests for extraversion/introversion which would avoid this problem, but I'm not aware of any more recent research in this area (mind you, I've been out of the field for a decade now).
Essentially you come to a point where extracting another value isn't explaining much more variance or producing a factor that's meaningful (e.g., two items of conscientiousness with negative wording are the entire new "factor" and only take variance explained from 80% to 82%).
https://www.theanalysisfactor.com/factor-analysis-how-many-f...
More generally, all of those metrics are pretty fluffy (the scree plot is probably the best, as it doesn't give you a p-value).
In order to actually do this right, you need multiple studies and CFA, but the standard in the field is to refit your exploratory model as a CFA on the original dataset, which is almost certainly causing overfitting in most cases.
Fwiw, my understanding is that most psychologists believe that with further study, these categories will map to actual functioning of the brain and nerve systems. For example, "Neuroticism" will somehow map to the excitability of certain nerve systems and "Agreeableness" will somehow map to functioning of our mirror and mentalizing systems. "Conscientiousness" will map to inhibiting functions, "Openness" will map to approach/flee type emotional functions, and "Extraversion" will map to systems like dopamine release on securing rewards for behavior.
Of course, there are limitations to this kind of approach and there's been a lot of research and refining done on top of this—not being an expert, I'm not familiar with it—but the core of the Big Five model is observational, not tautological.
The Big Five are a statistically-derived groupings of phrases that are reasonably stable when measured from different angles. I think it would be fair to call it a "modest initial result" if compared to the physical sciences, or "wildly successful" if compared to basically anything prior that came out of the social sciences. There are some quite reasonable critiques listed on the wikipedia page, such as a lack of modeling theory, or only accounting for a portion of personality differences, or arguments for a slightly different number of factors, etc. That said, it seems to be one of the first actually solid findings that ever came out of the social sciences. It's like the whole field has been flailing around, swept down a river in the dark, and for the first time we found a stone that has a bit of purchase, even if it's covered with moss and slippery.
That being said, it's much much harder to develop measures when you rely on other measures of the same type to validate them, which is where personality testing is right now.
Thank you for the correction.
It's a much, much better method for designing and analysing questionnaires, and it is the foundation for all standardised testing (SAT, MCAT etc).
For example, that conscientiousness (aka diligence/organization) correlates more positively than extraversion with Job Income but less positively with Life Satisfaction and negatively with Popularity.
Agreeableness having a light negative correlation with Income and Intelligence is also thought-provoking and not at all tautological.
Especially in relation to “neurological disorders” like ADHD. Where some people blame their ADHD for their behavior. Or basically anything that has to do with personality. It is clearly as you say tautological. You have a certain personality because you behave in a certain way, you don’t behave in a certain way cause you have a certain personality.
But then you have the fact that earlier personality can be used to predict future personality and future behavior. It is not causal but it is predictive.
Some people call that causal people in social science. I think that is twisting the definition of “causal”.
Some people define the self in such a way that free will can’t exist and others define the self in a way so that free will must exist ie. It could not possibly not exist.
Lack of agreeableness may drive others away, but if disageeable people also want less socialization, they might not be more lonely than agreeable people.
I personal think I'm pretty agreeable, but it would take a lot for me to feel lonely, so even if I were very disagreeable, I imagine I'd still have enough people around to suit me.
Personality is vague. It's pretty common knowledge that the brain is a complex machine and it's quite difficult to distillate some sort of evaluation, metric or measure for something that obviously has a million or billions ways to be measured.
It's already hard or difficult to treat psychiatric illness, so evaluating personality seems like an odd quest.
I'm not sure what's the point of this observation.
This is the case with every term.
How do we know someone is a murderer, a cry-baby, a thief, a chef, or any trait X?
Because "we define X in a certain way and then measure the degree to which someone conforms to the definition"
For instance, take a Big Five trait such as agreeableness. How do we know that a person is agreeable? Because we define agreeableness in a certain way and then measure the degree to which someone conforms to the definition. If that measurement includes questions such as, "Do others find you easy to get along with?" then of course there's going to be a negative correlation with loneliness, because you've essentially defined it that way.
I am the author of Correlated.org, which commits many different types of statistical errors for humor's sake, so this leaps out at me. By the way, for a surprisingly vast number of things, agreeableness is quite predictive. Food preferences, public policy positions, and even willingness to answer poll questions :)