Comment by iandanforth | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iandanforth | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a load of crap. More specifically it seems like a pre-scientific mindset. You use analogy and metaphor to describe phenomena and structures that are only half-understood to try to rationalize them and fit them into some sort of consistent narrative.

Wisdom is knowledge you can't describe. This seems like wisdom but just as it's really hard for a professional tennis player to describe exactly how they know where an opponent is going to hit a ball this guy seems to be grasping at straws to describe something he can't quite see and so can't quite describe to the rest of us.

If you think personality assessments have significant predictive power, or that using more than one of them increases predictive power, you don't know how they were made, how they are commonly applied, or the realities of psychometric assessment. It's exactly the kind of straw people grasp for when they want to, but do not understand a phenomenon of behavior.

If you follow this advice you will be participating in a cargo cult.

> it's really hard for a professional tennis player to describe exactly how they know where an opponent is going to hit a ball

Andre Agassi explains one exact way in just under three minutes:

https://youtu.be/57BMzCM6hQI

It is rather specific. How many tennis players have such explicit ticks?

He literally discusses the origins and problems of various personality tests in his article

"he knew the Big Five was solid as science"

His discussion is neither critical nor credible.

He’s assuming some knowledge and experience on the part of the reader; that’s how it appears to me.

Upon reflection it seems like he went overly broad with the scope of this article.

If you’ve already interacted with things like the Enneagram test, you’ll already have the context to deal with his comments.

I learned a ton from this post, perhaps it’s because I’ve had a lot of experience interacting with all the problems and challenges he lists out. I got a lot of nuggets from it in terms of insights into problems I have faced and will continue to face.

Perhaps for the less experienced, this is less helpful, as they would miss this context.

For other people who are interested as myself, I looked up "Enneagram test" on Wikipedia. The intro concludes with:

> There has been limited formal psychometric analysis of the Enneagram and the peer-reviewed research that has been done has not been widely accepted within the relevant academic communities.[5] Though the Enneagram integrates concepts generally accepted in a theory of personality,[6] it has been dismissed as pseudoscience by some personality assessment experts and called "pseudoscientific at best".[7]

The references are:

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=EQFPCQAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y...

https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp-rj.20...

https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/enneagram-personality-test...

No judgement but your comments read like they are written by a cult acolyte e.g., I'm sure there are many steps, "things" to learn in Scientology

He doesn't discuss the problems or limitations. Here's his section on "assessing" myer briggs

>I tend to test as an “INTP.” Everyone now understands the usefulness of introversion versus extroversion. The difference between the “P” (extreme comfort with uncertainty) vs. colleagues and romantic partners who are “J” (a tendency to nail things down, to be decisive and minimize uncertainty) has also been useful at times. When I interview people I also sometimes notice the “S” (sensing) tendency to be super literal and concrete, in good and bad ways, versus the more abstract “N” (intuition). I think it’s particularly useful to track S vs. N between yourself and someone you work for or who works for you, because communication difficulties may boil down to that dimension, and it’s useful to have a vocabulary for the tension.

He doesn't pause for even a second to consider that perhaps myer briggs could be a bad tool for determining these aspects of a personality or to acknowledge that even if this was the case, people don't behave honestly in professional situations anyway.

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