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Comment by souprock | Hacker News Reader

Check the math in the article. (the correlation tables especially, both against the "Big 5" and for repeatability) If Myers-Briggs is not science, then the "Big 5" personality traits are also not science. They are tied together, each strongly predictive of the other. Results are repeatable, especially if not rounded to boolean values.

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I'm going to suggest a hypothetical. Let's ignore any personality test specifics just to generalize.

Ok, so I have a candidate for a position, who shows +5% to "conscientiousness". What does that mean, practically, for me as an employer? It means exactly nothing, because that trait is so vague as to be ... meaningless. (That's just the start of the problems with these tests.)

Even if it M-B (or whatever) is a repeatable effect it has no value as a predictor of performance of a single individual. In aggregate, maybe... (but also no, see the wiki).

It's just people playing Management Consultant extracting money from Management.

Imagine you have a job that is highly detail-oriented. Perhaps data must be perfect or a number of steps must be followed but checking the employee's work might be cumbersome.

You have two applicants, roughly equal. One scores higher on conscientiousness ...

Do you believe that measurement is actually accurate?

Well, we were discussing the utility of such a test. I would assume that by the time we got to the point of utility, we would have agreed that the thing itself was valid. There's no point in discussing the utility of a thing that didn't work.

For somebody who admits having no idea what it's for, you seem awfully confident of your opinion.

> For somebody who admits having no idea what it's for

I'm sorry, what?

I did ask that as a rhetorical flourish in a different thread (as a response to you, in fact), but c'mon. You specifically said

> It's not science, or science-adjacent, or anything to do with science. It doesn't pretend to be. That's not what it's for.

I note that you didn't answer my other question: how do you justify its use if it's not 'science'.

EDIT: Btw, my allusion was to a comment by Stephen Fry in a debate. (Specifics are no doubt going to lead to more contention, so I'll omit them.)

Some people insist science=good, therefore not-science=not-good. But the world is bigger than that.

Your responsibility as a human is to discover value in things you encounter. Failing to find it is just failing, and says more about you than about things.

Please don't cross into personal attack in HN threads. It's not what this site is for, and wrecks what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I am not attacking anyone, personally or otherwise. What I wrote applies to anybody, myself included.

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