Most Personality Quizzes Are Junk Science. Take One That Isn’t | Hacker News Reader

Most Personality Quizzes Are Junk Science. Take One That Isn’t

projects.fivethirtyeight.com

47 pointswallflower25 comments

For HN readers that were turned off by the title ‘personality quiz’ and immediately jumped to the comments, these ‘big five’ are somewhat unfairly called a personality quiz.

These five traits are generated by putting hundreds of possible personality axes into statistical analysis to find those axes that are uncorrelated with each other. (By grouping those who correlate into the same bucket) In other words, there was no pseudo-scientist psychologist that hand-picked these.

These five traits also seem to roughly map to individual distinct parts of physical human brain that we already know as distinct units to some extent, which is a good validation for anatomical science and statistical method used here.

In short, these are the ‘primary colours’ of human psychology, and by mixing these in appropriate amounts, one gets the full spectrum of human personality. There’s also preliminary research, I think, that shows these five traits apply not only to humans but also to other higher functioning primates as well, but don’t quote me on that - I’m having trouble finding a citation for that one right now.

This specific quiz on this website is actually too short to give out any statistically valid answer, the tests I have seen administered in an academic setting can last as long as 180 minutes. They’re pretty boring though, they ask very similar questions in slightly different wordings and phrasings to rule out a particular reaction to a specific word in the question.

"the primary colours of human psychology"

Where did you get that description? It's brilliant.

Nowhere — I often fall victim to my own flourishing tendencies. But thanks!

I'm so stealing it. Such a beautiful exposition.

> These five traits are generated by putting hundreds of possible personality axes into statistical analysis to find those axes that are uncorrelated with each other.

That depends on the axes you start with...

Ask a bunch of questions about "can you write neatly", "can you juggle", "can you balance a pen upright on your finger", and suddenly your "5 personality traits" will include a category for motor control, pushing out or shifting the meaning of the original categories.

You can't therefore claim that these categories are decided by stats only, without arbitrary human input.

The repeated questions are also designed to detect if you are just answering at random. If your answers to these similar questions are wildly different, your test score is likely to be judged invalid.

Sorry (even as i am tempted to do this quiz), but ...

Is this sponsored by (the defunct) Cambridge Analytica or some similar entity ?

Isn't this exactly how many of those companies operate ?

It doesn't ask for any personal details to complete it.

Seemed accurate enough as the result I got correlated closely with one I did I few years back that was definitely more intrusive but eye-opening.

Someone setup a crawler that would take your HN comments and pass them to Watson's personality insights. I was brutally honest just now and the results were the same.

There are a lot of tracking links on that page. It is THE perfect behavioral tracking info to attach to someone's online advertising profiles.

That would require them to be specifically tracking this questionnaire for that purpose and filing the results against your profile or shadow profile.

As I noted, it is possible to derive a reasonably accurate profile simply from the language a person uses, so if you're on Facebook, or use GMail they have enough data passing through their servers to profile you anyway.

Technology like this:

https://personality-insights-demo.ng.bluemix.net/

Including Google or FB advertising id?

538 still relevant? I thought people dropped their data driven snake oil after the election blow out in 2016

It wasn't a blow out - if I recall, they gave a >30% chance for Trump to win. It seems perfectly ordinary for Trump to have won, then - "mild surprise" at most.

Their track record is still excellent.

They also called out those who were claiming a trump win at < 2%.

They actually were called out for giving Trump such a high chance of victory by many. In particular, the Huffington Post accused Nate Silver and 538 of intentionally biasing their results to make it seem like Trump had a better shot.

Somehow in the months following the election the narrative completely turned around and now 538 were hacks for not giving Trump an even better chance.

Because of the winner takes all distributions in most states the result can flip very easily. If more states had proportional representation for the Electoral College the confidence level would be very high.

If they had just predicted the nationwide popular vote, Trump wasn't even close. The chance of him winning the popularity vote was probably in the order of < 2%.

Why do they get praise for their 2012 predictions but get a pass for their 2016 mispredictions? If they gave Trump a 30% chance to win and, as you say, it is perfectly ordinary for a 30% chance event to happen, then what is the point of their prediction? What is the point of listening to someone who can never be wrong?

Yes, the projections are essentially useless. Nassim Taleb does a great job of laying this out - basically, the projections create a false sense of certainty onto a highly uncertain set of events.

https://towardsdatascience.com/why-you-should-care-about-the...

https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1911110/what-is-nas...

If I have the ability to predict coin tosses correct 55% of the time, that would be incredible - an almost unreal talent. And I'd be wrong 45% of the time.

For any one prediction, it's hard to say that a probability distribution is "wrong", but across many predictions, we can definitely evaluate the accuracy of a predictor and quantify whether they're useful or not.

538 has an excellent track record.

I know Mythbusters isn't the most scientific, but when they tested this, although with a small sample size so it could be off, if you choose Tails every time you should hit well over 55% based on the weight distribution of the coin.

They can be wrong. The problem is that you are looking at a single data point. Judging their performance requires viewing all of their predictions, across all elections, and seeing how often their predicted probabilities match up with outcomes. Do the people they give a 30% chance of winning win 30% of those races? Do the people they give a 60% chance of winning win 60% of those races?

That is how you judge their performance, and from that lens they do quite well.

> It wasn't a blow out - if I recall, they gave a >30% chance for Trump to win. It seems perfectly ordinary for Trump to have won, then - "mild surprise" at most.

Revisionist history.

I was in San Francisco the months leading up to the election, employees at startups were refreshing 538 pretty much every minute waiting for their latest data visualizations to confirm their pre-existing beliefs that "the democrat's got this"

To them, the literal worst case scenario was an electoral college TIE. Which of course would have also resulted in a Trump victory, but an electoral college BLOWOUT? And now you want to find satisfaction in defining the semantics of a blow out when it is obviously for emphasis and effect? seriously.

It was hopium since the primaries, 538 lost their credibility.

I was also in San Francisco and the delusion was incredible. I was posting almost weekly on Facebook that people were overstating Clinton's chances of winning, and that the pollsters giving it a <2% chance were way off the mark. I have the evidence to prove this, trivially.

> I was in San Francisco the months leading up to the election, employees at startups were refreshing 538 pretty much every minute waiting for their latest data visualizations to confirm their pre-existing beliefs that "the democrat's got this"

True, and consistent with what I've said.

> To them, the literal worst case scenario was an electoral college TIE.

I don't care what San Francisco startup employees expected.

> And now you want to find satisfaction in defining the semantics of a blow out when it is obviously for emphasis and effect?

Trump's victory wasn't exceptionally large in the history of the electoral college. You can verify this yourself.

> 538 lost their credibility.

They gave Trump reasonable odds to win. He did. I'm not sure what you're missing.

I'm unsure what you are talking about, but as the other person stated, 538 gave Trump a 30% chance to win. If your colleagues interpreted that as a surefire thing then that reflects on you all poorly, not 538.

Only the people who don't understand basic probability dropped them

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