What personality is that blog? | Hacker News Reader

What personality is that blog?

typealyzer.com

41 pointserikstarck21 comments

This is very cool! I think it would also be cool for bloggers to link to an analysis of a site using a GET link, e.g. http://typealyzer.com/?url=www.techcrunch.com. This might also lead to viral growth (if desired).

It was correct for both my technical blog, and my personal blog on which I tend to pontificate, but incorrect on my weight-loss blog (no, I haven't lost any yet).

Overall, that seems pretty good, as the only inaccuracy is on a site on which I post short, one sentence updates.

See also: http://genderanalyzer.com/

Unlike personality classifications (which are essentially witchcraft with better marketing), gender is objectively verifiable (yeah yeah gender studies students, I passed the class too, thanks for your comment) and so makes for a much more productive area of research. Trivial algorithms (~60 lines of awk last time I did it) are very capable of pegging gender with 80%+ accuracy for some corpora.

See generally: http://u.cs.biu.ac.il/~koppel/papers/male-female-text-final....

You're speaking of "sex," not "gender" -- the former is biological and there are two of them; the latter is cultural or social and there could be arbitrarily many.

I say this while being a conservative; the semantic distinction is a useful one, although attempting to blur the distinction between a (biological) sex and a (cultural) gender never does any good.

Why couldn't patio11 be speaking of gender? In fact, I think a study measuring gender would identify with even more accuracy, although data collection would be harder (you would need the authors to report how they identified). Anyways, the linked study uses the word "gender" - it's probably conflating the two, as often happens.

... because he said that it is objectively verifiable

Which gender is. Your gender is how you identify, so unless you are lying to a researcher who asks you what gender you identify as, it's objectively verifiable.

there are intersex biologies to account for if you want to be very precise

It was 79% sure my blog was written by a man but it was 74% sure my girlfriend's blog was written by a man as well.

I'm not impressed.

It's 57% sure http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/ is written by a woman, too.

You need a larger sample size before being impressed or unimpressed. If it's 74% sure of something, it should be wrong a quarter of the time; if not, its confidence estimate was too low.

I tried all three of my blogs, personal, tech and gardening and got three different answers. I'm definitely a T but all others are up in the air. For what it's worth, I float back and forth between INTJ and ISTJ. My personal blog was ENTJ, my tech blog was ISTJ and my gardening blog was ESTP. That last one seemed really odd and I dug in a little further.

It appears that my gardening blog has been hacked at some point and literally hundreds of links for viagra and other fun stuff has been added to my page. No wonder the TypeAnalyzer thought I was a doer. Now I'm off to try and fix it.

Interesting. My blog home page is only titles, and that wasn't enough data for a correct prediction - it said I'm an ESTP. With more data (i.e. my rss feed) it was spot on: INTP.

I'm curious how this can pick up on introversion vs extraversion. It would seem that such would be difficult to analyze just based on a person's writing.

Easy. Blog: extraversion. Empty page: introversion.

I know you're probably joking, but that's a really ignorant and unsubstantiated suggestion. I'm strongly introverted, yet I blog and (gasp) argue with people online.

Introversion is not the same as being shy, awkward, diffident, or mute. It has more to do with what situations energize you, which ones drain you, how you enjoy spending your time, how you relax, et cetera.

I'm an especially strong ENTJ, but my blog (zachaysan.tumblr.com) is classified as an ISTP. Is there an explainable reason for this?

Yes, what is normality called personalitype refers to the idea that you ARE something, which is BS. What words you have used at a particular moment (if unconciuos about this) shows two interesting things however: a) What parts of reality you focus your attention to about a situation (the people, the facts, the values etc) b) Your cognitive preferences over time. Call it a personality type if you want to or just "a people-oriented type" etc

(FYI: mattiasostmar is the inventor of the Typealyzer.)

Mine was exactly right: INTP.

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