

Algorithm predicts Five Factor personality type better than Facebook friends - ryan_j_naughton
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/this-algorithm-knows-you-better-than-your-facebook-friends-do/

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stolio
I had a whole joke I just had to erase because it was based on there being no
way all the things in that list having facebook pages. I thought it was
nonsense. But I was wrong:

[https://www.facebook.com/pages/I-hate-it-when-people-lie-
to-...](https://www.facebook.com/pages/I-hate-it-when-people-lie-to-
me/322361002793)

[https://www.facebook.com/pages/Uncontrollable-swearing-
after...](https://www.facebook.com/pages/Uncontrollable-swearing-after-
stubbing-your-toe-in-a-dark-room/70621254406)

The list makes much more sense now

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therealdrag0
Isn't it a bit sandy of a foundation to base the whole thing on self-
judgments? Is it surprising that self-judged personality tests is going to
correlate well with self-picked likes?

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gwern
The Big Five has a lot of external validity (as do the regression estimates of
Big Five, if you read the paper), so that's fine. If things like
Conscientiousness really do predict income, longevity, etc, then even if
they're a 'self-judgment', why is that a problem.

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idiotclock
The message is that our personalities are encapsulated by objects and media.
These items of evident importance are of course legitimated by the benevolence
of facebook's curation. Facebook is not a social experiment, it's a marketing
tool.

Anyway, the _accuracy_ of the study depends on a self-report.

~~~
dkarapetyan
Right, the goal is to convince marketers that the digital shadow and the meat
casting that shadow are one and the same.

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kelukelugames
Trying to explain the results gives me a headache. "Programmers" indicates
shyness makes sense but "In n' Out" burgers means calm and relaxed?

~~~
jameshart
In n' Out Burgers correlates with California, which correlates with NOT being
from the Northeast, which correlates with being, relatively, calm and relaxed.

~~~
sehr
Why are Californians chiller than others? I wonder if it's actually true

~~~
kleer001
Californian here. Yes, we are. It's the nice weather.

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gweinberg
Based on the likes chart, I've concluded my big 5 profile is "grumpy old fart
that doesn't like anything".

~~~
cheepin
I came to that conclusion when they told me "Sorry, it looks like you don’t
have a sufficient number of Facebook Likes for us to generate an accurate
enough prediction!"

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killerpopiller
are partners good "matches" if their 5-factor personalities are approaching
congruence?

~~~
svachalek
That's a little off topic and I think you can probably find some relevant
articles on the web but I remember reading about that before. As I remember,
matching openness is pretty important for compatibility purposes, for
neuroticism the important thing is that one or both scores are low, and for
the others there are various advantages/disadvantages to matching up.

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siegecraft
This is like every undergraduate's machine learning first project ever, right
up there with "using twitter and sentiment analysis to predict ____"

