Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, CJR's interview with Sue Gardner executive director -- i.e. the person who fired Julia Angwin -- has been the most revealing thing so far, because it's the first interview in which Gardner has spoken out in detail about her reasons (Jeff Larson, the managing editor, had written a Medium post but did not go into details about the reasons for firing Angwin [1]).

This is one of the biggest clusterfucks of media drama I have ever seen. Because Angwin was the first to take this fight public, and because she has obvious reasons to feel aggrieved, I had assumed her framing would be as uncharitable as possible to the co-founders who fired her. But accepting Gardner's claims at face value in defense of her decision only makes Angwin's case seem even stronger:

> Gardner felt that, as a senior executive, Angwin should be willing to take part in team-building exercises by submitting to a Myers-Briggs personality test, and should be more enthusiastic about attending meetings. She was alarmed that Angwin did not agree to formal performance assessments for herself and her team (Angwin says she never refused to do performance reviews). Gardner says she found such behavior “unnerving coming from someone in an executive position” and that she believes Angwin wanted an adversarial relationship between editorial staff and management.

(disclosure: I used to work at ProPublica, but did not intersect with Angwin's time there, but do admire her journalism work)

[0] https://www.cjr.org/analysis/the-markup.php

[1] https://medium.com/@jeff_larson/about-the-markup-6adc6a77810...

Well in her defense the Myers Briggs is tarot cards for people with LinkedIn profiles. There’s not a bit of scientific validity behind it. It’s an entertainment experience not a psychometrically valid diagnostic instrument.

A data driven exploration of Myers briggs might make a good article.

It would be a short article. There's really no reliable data.

Nah, there's quite a bit.

However, saying that the Myers-Briggs is the worst personality test available is a little bit like saying the Holocaust was the worst genocide ever. It's true, but that doesn't mean that the others were good.

In general, personality psychometrics is a pretty difficult field to work in. We don't have another source of data for personality, and as such, it's difficult to measure constructs appropriately.

Additionally, modern psychometric methods like IRT work best for tests where the answer is known, and so without another source of evidence, personality psychometrics is a very difficult field.

Finally, the "supported" model in psychology, the Five Factor Model is potentially not robust. The issue is that the authors refuse to use confirmatory factor analysis on their model, and invent new methods (procrustean rotation) to justify their particular choice of constructs.

When these analyses were done by others and suggested that their model was incorrect, they huffed and puffed their way through the ensuing academic catfight in the journals.

tl;dr myers briggs bad, nothing else is much better.

The only time I've ever taken Myers Briggs was during a team-building retreat for being a college residence hall advisor. It was just a "for fun" thing, like doing the trust fall exercise. For the director to say she judged Angwin for refusing to do Myers Briggs is as comical and absurd to me as whining that Angwin was scared to do the trust fall, or didn't like playing icebreaker bingo.

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