That's why people who claim to have this ability almost never do. Its not in the nature of someone who can to really talk about it this way.
I'd also argue that courts are definitely not the place to have this. There's good reasons why this is likely to fail in a stressful setting (convicting someone of a crime or reviewing evidence) vs a situation of neutrality. Once you start mixing in other factors I imagine this gets blurry real fast. Its all very context dependent.
To tack on further, courts by structure also have a burden of proof aspect to limit / remove the human element as much as possible (in theory anyway) and that is very important.
See the whole criticism section.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi...
With the four discrete variables in MBTI, I can type people with 90% accuracy after a conversation.
The problem is that each letter comes from splitting a normal distribution in half right at the middle where maximum likelihood is. So most people won't be very strongly attached to most of their letters.
Hasn't Myers Briggs been debunked as a load of pseudoscience shit?
(that doesn't mean we should do it in courts to convict people)
If we treat this kind of thing as an oracle rather than admit that it's a flawed heuristic, even a good heuristic being ultimately flawed, I think that's pretty dangerous. One has to be extremely humble at the task of evaluating people, because it's difficult and error-prone.
E.g. if the manager in this story said "no" and that person wasn't hired, how would you know she was correct?
I will say that there was a non-zero number of "she said 'no', person was hired anyway and it turned out to not be good". As sister/cousin threads have pointed out: this might be a self fulfilling prophecy.
What this manager did isn't practically different from what all interviewers do, except the particular manager wasn't the specific target of the usual manipulations[0] candidates will do to seem better. The manager is likely to have a better understanding of how the candidate bullshits (or if they do) when they're not the target of the bullshit.
[0] Used as a descriptor; e.g. "manipulating" someone to decide they should see a doctor for their toe infection isn't bad.
There's merit to this argument.
Consider people who get scammed or catfished -- it's obvious to an outside observer. You're less likely to fool yourself when you have no skin in the game.
Have you never heard of someone being a good judge of character?
I’ve heard of people claiming to be a good judge of character, or claiming other people are, usually without evidence and as an excuse for actions which involve disregarding objective indicia of character as it relates to the decision at hand, and very often as an excuse specifically for making decisions that seem to amount to disregarding objective criteria to favor their own and/or a generally-socially-favored race, ethnicity, subculture, etc.
Dragonwriter, now that's a good name, you'd have a shot for sure.
Not so long ago, I would have certainly agreed with you until I met this one girl.
So we started dating and, a couple months in, sometimes, as a joke, I use to say to her: "the first time I saw you, blablabla beautiful blablabla a star in the sky blablabla". I did that not only once but many many times. And every time, every time, she would have the exact same answer. She would say: "the first time I saw you, I thought 'oh bof'" (meaning she thought I was mediocre). So you know, I thought she only plays hard to get, like women do. That didnt bother me. Time passes and I kept going with my "the first time I saw you .."s. Kind of know she liked it anyway. And she kept on having the same answer.
At one point I thought something was strange. She kept on having those exact same words again and again. 'Oh bof'. Again and again. I could sense she was actually trying to tell me something entirely else.
Until I realised what she was saying. When I did realised what she was saying, I was shocked.
The first time I saw her... what I really thought was... 'Oh bof'. This is literally word for word what I thought the first time I saw her. I thought in my head: 'Oh bof'. But not only the words matched perfectly, the ton as well.
I pass on the details but let me tell you that girl knew exactly my state of mind even when I was in the next room.
Thats the time I learnt some people can tell exactly what you think just by looking at you. This is frightening. They can because they started observing people at a very young age. They love to observe people. Exactly like it is said in that pg's post: they observe.
Imagine if we applied this kind of thinking in courts. We would convict a lot of innocent people. We wouldn't feel that we need to wait for all the facts and evidence to come in, because our radar for people is so good. We don't do it that way, because it's nonsense.