Pyrian on 22/6/2020 at 23:25
Quote Posted by Gryzemuis
If that is derailing this thread, then I don't know what we're supposed to talk about.
Bad personality tests?
Starker on 23/6/2020 at 00:11
Quote Posted by Pyrian
It's 50%-75% bunk. Just bunk. We can tell from the data that there's no underlying personality trait for at least 2 of the 4 dichotomies (and that there
is for just one of them, introversion/extroversion). You could associate any random set of uncorrelated questions and/or answer completely randomly and get a very similar distribution of answers that MBTI gets.
Even the basic extraversion/introversion dichotomy is often misunderstood and misinterpreted, the former being perceived as something more positive and desirable and extraverted people being seen as more natural leaders.
I don't put much stock in Jung myself, but it's hard to deny how influential he was on 20th century thinking, to the point where you can talk about pre-Jungian and post-Jungian literature.
demagogue on 23/6/2020 at 01:24
I tend to be more existentialist in that the self we should care about is the one people make for themselves by their important life decisions and going through existential moments of revelation. The idea of pinning a self onto relatively trivial personality quirks to me, even if we're talking about more empirically grounded system like the Big Five, it's still just a very shallow way of looking at a person.
It's something that strikes me about contemporary thinking generally, how excited people are to gut agency and reduce humans to reflexes, making selves have more to do with what happens to them, how likely they are to sneeze, than what they think or do on the important matters. I wanna be more like Pinkguy facing down Bane, arms out saying MF ecce homo.
PigLick on 23/6/2020 at 12:28
you know if you google cyberealism you get jigsaw puzzles.
I SEE YOUR GAME DEMA AND YOU DONT FOOL ME
yes its one of those nights, Renz ban me before its too late!
those puzzles look pretty dope though
PigLick on 23/6/2020 at 12:31
[video=youtube;zI2BzHWue6E]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zI2BzHWue6E[/video]
heywood on 23/6/2020 at 23:37
Quote Posted by Pyrian
Not really interested in going deep into the BS at the heart of the very premise of MBTI, so I'll just post this:
(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indicator#No_evidence_for_dichotomies)
It's 50%-75% bunk. Just bunk. We can tell from the data that there's no underlying personality trait for at least 2 of the 4 dichotomies (and that there
is for just one of them, introversion/extroversion). You could associate any random set of uncorrelated questions and/or answer completely randomly and get a very similar distribution of answers that MBTI gets.
Look, I'm not advocating the MBTI. I think it's outlived its usefulness. But that particular critique is wrong. First off, a normal distribution is to be expected for a personality trait. The only personality traits for which you would expect to find a bi-modal distribution are the ones where there's social pressure to categorize yourself one way or the other, like sexual orientation. And it's kind of pointless to include those in a personality assessment. Also, the author in that Wiki article is wrong to say the types are split at the middle of the distribution. They are not. Also, if the questions were answered randomly, you would not get a normal distribution because the individual questions are weighted. For example, an answer of 'a' on question XX scores you 2 points towards 'T' but an answer of 'b' on the same question doesn't score anything for 'F'. Also, the total points available is not the same for both sides of each scale. The total possible points for 'S' is 50% higher than for 'N'. In fact, we looked for normal distributions in our student sample as a sign that we were properly administering the test and getting usable results.
The most important criticism of the MBTI, and personality assessments in general, is that they are misused, especially in the corporate world. IMHO, the MBTI should never be a factor in staffing decisions. I think it *might* be useful in coaching and team building contexts, but it's usually not because most of the people using it don't even really know the theory it's based on. Which is outdated anyway.
The MBTI was just one of multiple different measures we used. Some of them correlated very strongly with standardized test performance and some hardly at all. With the MBTI in particular, there was no correlation between test performance and E-I. There were strong correlations between every test measure and S-N, and moderate correlations with T-F. IIRC, there was also slight correlation between SAT Math score and J-P. Also, T also seemed to amplify the effect of N, so that the mean SAT score for the _NT_ types was something like 200 points over the mean of the full population. Those advantages were there in every school, despite large disparities in mean test performance. The worst of the schools we measured had a mean SAT score around 100 points below the national average and the best was around +150, but types had the same influence in every school relative to the school mean. There was a racial component as well. African-Americans scored worse overall on the SAT and ACT, which was common knowledge and expected. What we didn't expect was that most of the difference in test scores could be explained by the distribution of MBTI types among African-Americans in our sample. The MBTI turned out to be one of the better correlated measures in our study.
I'm starting to ramble on a bit now, but will mention one more thing. The least influential measure in our results was a differentiation test. I'm not sure I could even find a source for it, because I think it may have been my cog sci professor's creation. It attempted to categorize people based on how strongly they perceived similarities vs. differences between things. On the measure, some people's results would be strongly bifurcated indicating they were responding much more strongly to the differences between things. Others would be centrally grouped, indicating they were responding to the similarities. This measure had little correlation with student academic or test performance, so it was hardly mentioned in our conclusions. But it was somewhat enlightening to find out how differently people can perceive the same relationships, and I think it explains a lot of what we see in political discourse.
demagogue on 24/6/2020 at 05:12
Quote Posted by PigLick
you know if you google cyberealism you get jigsaw puzzles.
I SEE YOUR GAME DEMA AND YOU DONT FOOL ME
those puzzles look pretty dope though
Nah, it's a great term because nobody has used it for anything of any ambition yet. It's been a few things like that puzzle game and some kid's forgettable Geocities site, but more or less it's up for grabs to name a movement. One of these days I'm going to introduce people to the cybereal and they aren't going to be able to go back to seeing the world as it once was.
I have to find the right hook to pull people into it though. The best I've got right now is... alright, imagine they come up with some Augmented Reality system that they graft into your visual and parietal cortex that mixes experience of the real world with computer augmented HUD shit overlaying it that's constructed directly in people's vision. Then you can start directly manipulating your perception of the world.
If you imagine yourself in that situation long enough, then you start realizing that perception is just code. There's no boundary between the extra computer code and what your brain has always been doing. And at a certain point you're going to realize, actually that code isn't coming from the computer, it's just like a .dll feeding data to the .exe running it through the CPU. Consciousness has always been code.
You are the code. You always have been. When you see the world through that perspective, you're going to start seeing it differently. You start seeing it as it's literally constructed around you, as you are literally constructed into you, bit by bit through your CPU. You feel yourself emerge from the algorithms, as the algorithms, as yourself in total autonomy over yourself.
Only then you'll have a glimpse of the world as it truly is, a glimpse of yourself as you truly are. That's when you will have made contact with the cybereal. The Matrix didn't even break the skin of how deep that rabbit hole really goes.
Sulphur on 24/6/2020 at 05:47
I'm gonna quote a spiel from noted philosophist, sage, and overall wise person Steven Wilson: 'Once we've made sense of our world, we wanna go fuck up everybody else's because his or her truth doesn't match mine. But this is the problem. Truth is individual calculation. Which means because we all have different perspectives, there isn't one singular truth, is there?'
All right, jokes aside, just to clarify: I think that's a very down to earth take on the phenomenologist equation, which is something I read up on only because I saw Dark Star when I was a teenager and it tickled me hard. (Anyone who hasn't seen Dark Star -- well, it's not aged well, but it's still got one of the best endings to a sci-fi comedy known to man/). I don't think knowledge of the interrelated processes of your consciousness and what they are necessarily allows you to control it - you can attempt to tweak it, but control is... we've evolved as creatures of instinct with a fundamental fight-or-flight system that deals with short-term threat management first and foremost, and we're not great at long-term modification of the way we work. Perhaps we're on the way to it as we're still evolving, but it's a long way off.
You're also going to run against the Ship of Theseus problem eventually once you start talking about strapping on different things into your psyche via technology, but that's very firmly a sci-fi issue as of today.
Sulphur on 24/6/2020 at 09:16
The spirit of that quote is in understanding that your perspective doesn't apply to everyone because they're different from you, and that applies to how they're going to react to what you perceive as 'truth', too. It's not meant to be used as some form of reductionism. Also, context: I put it in as a joke because it's a song lyric from an album about Trump's relationship with truth, it's not exactly a deeply philosophical statement.
Anyway, this is veering off-course so I've got nothing more to say about that here; I'm more interested in how dema's cybereal analogues work out.
demagogue on 24/6/2020 at 09:38
I should clarify, it doesn't really have anything to do with being plugged into anything, and it may be an unhelpful distraction to mention it.
It's just, people intuitively understand when they're plugged into something that there's code at the bottom of it. But they don't think that way when it's just their vanilla consciousness, which is what I really wanted to focus on. One is just a good entryway into the other.
The reference to phenomenology (& with it existentialism) fits pretty well though. I think of this like next gen existentialism. I think it's friendly to the idea that people can have their own understandings and values they live by. But it also plays to the idea that when you experience something, it isn't just your personal experience. Other people might not be able to access it, but it's a real part of the universe, something people should take responsibility for.
Well, one of these days I'll write a manifesto, and I'll explain it all there. It'd go a long way to explain my thoughts about a question like "who are you?"