
Most Personality Quizzes Are Junk Science. Take One That Isn’t - wallflower
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/personality-quiz/
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rolleiflex
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.

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james_s_tayler
"the primary colours of human psychology"

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

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

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

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

<paranoia mode on>

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

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

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dwd
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.

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m463
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.

~~~
dwd
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/](https://personality-
insights-demo.ng.bluemix.net/)

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

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lazzlazzlazz
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.

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typon
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?

~~~
lazzlazzlazz
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.

~~~
idDriven
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.

