Subject:
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Re: Personality test vs. Religion
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Thu, 4 Nov 2004 16:28:14 GMT
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Viewed:
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2864 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, David Eaton wrote:
**snip all of that, yours and mine**
Let's start afresh, because we've veered into abstract neuro-epistemology that I
don't think either of is qualified to address.
However, I've been thinking about the double blind we discussed previously, and
here's what I suggest:
Administer the MBTI to a group of subjects without telling them what it's about
or how the results will be used or analyzed. Upon completion, isolate one
example of each of the 16 permutations of MBTI results, and discard the rest.
Have a team of psychologists evalute the corresponding 16 subjects to develop
reasonably detailed psychological profiles on each. The psychologists'
assessments are subjective, of course, but one would hope that teamwork would
yield some kind of "less" subjective profile.
Have a second team of psychologists attempt to match the 16 MBTI results with
the 16 psych profiles, and see how many successful "hits" you get. The way to
do this is to "refresh" the field after each selection, so that for each subject
you must choose between 16 MBTI results.
The probability of any one person being randomly matched to his MBTI result is
1/16. Nominally, a success rate exceeding that might be an indication that the
test has a better-than-chance predictive/descriptive value, but I'm a little
more picky; a 6.25% success rate doesn't impress me. If I'm seeking to evaluate
a test for its predictive/descriptive value, I'd want a success rate of at least
50%, wouldn't you? I mean, if a test is right only one time in fifteen, I'd
call it a pretty lousy test.
Anyway, two problems present themselves to me immediately:
16 MBTI results is clearly far too few to provide a usefully specific
description of any test subject. Proponents of the MBTI still laud it as
"specific enough," but that just doesn't cut it for me. Again, I refer you to
my World Series summation, or my previous example of the non-lose-able pinball
machine.
The psychologists' assessments may be well-informed, but they're subjective even
if they work as a team. With this in mind, the best you can ever say is
"according to these psychologists..." and that still doesn't count as anything
more than professional testimony.
I have to confess that I regard questions such as "how do you prove that Bob
*really* is depressed" to be distractions from the central topic, and I'm less
interested in discussing them. We can debate them in another thread, but I'm
not going to pursue them here.
Dave!
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Personality test vs. Religion
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| (...) Heh, phew! (...) Awesome! That's what I was looking for. That although you may not accept the CURRENT data you've seen as accurate, that you WOULD be willing to accept data, even though it runs at least SOME risk of being subjective, that (...) (20 years ago, 4-Nov-04, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Personality test vs. Religion
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| (...) Now that's a suprise to me-- Let's say I adamantly insist I'm a P, not a J, so when I test as a J, I manipulated it to be a P. But 58 psychologists rate me as a J, so if you compare my results against EITHER P or J you're right either way? (...) (20 years ago, 3-Nov-04, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)
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