Comment by advael | Hacker News Reader

Comment by advael | Hacker News Reader

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Interesting test. I apparently am about as high as you can likely get a percentile score to go for the number of questions here on inner voice and representational manipulation, and as low as possible on mind's eye and orthographic representation

The inner voice and mind's eye don't surprise me, I'm among the more hyperlexic people I know and seem to have total aphantasia, but I didn't realize (though I guess it seems like an obvious possibility in retrospect) that there were people who processed words as text in their head - I guess the survey itself said that surprised them too.

I also didn't consider that there could be a large degree of variability in representational manipulation, and assume that this kind of inevitably leads to some pretty hard to bridge inferential gaps when speaking across that divide. Honestly maybe I'm misunderstanding what's meant by that, because the other extreme sounds to me like there are some people who just can't do metacognition which sounds insane. I'm guessing however that this is similar to an experience I had with a (now ex-)lover who was shocked when I mentioned I don't have visualization, and asked "So you're telling me you have no imagination at all?", which like, I wouldn't say is true? My imagination can be prosaic, narrative, auditory, abstract, olfactory, emotional, or kinematic, just not visual. I kind of assume that's similar to what I'm doing here, like whatever "manipulating representations" means here is a useful capability by which to do metacognition but not the thing itself... but it seemed like their questions pertained to a lot of different kinds of manipulation of abstractions or mental models, so I can't really figure out how you'd examine your thoughts per se without that ability. Maybe there's someone more knowledgeable about this field here that could help me understand the distinction?

How does one even get high inner voice score there? I dialogue in my head all the time and answered “sa” to most of the inner voice questions, but fell on the far left side on that graph. Feels like other questions subtract from it silently. Instead I got high score in object rotation which I can do easily but it isn’t my main mode of thinking. I usually think abstractions and/or speak myself into convincing they are good enough.

I probably failed due to this agree/disagree test laziness. You never know what they meant by things like “I often enjoy X”. What does strongly disagree mean here? Never? I don’t enjoy? What if I don’t enjoy it, but do often? Why not ask it directly like “I X: never sometimes often” or “I relate to X: hare it … love it”. Even then it’s unclear what “sometimes” means. Once in a year, in a month, in a day? This indirection and vagueness adds so much noise to the result.

I guess all this tells how I think more than the test itself.

Weird, based on the wording of the questions and the categories they presented I kind of just assumed that each question only pertained to one of them. If they're doing something more complex I didn't notice it. But maybe they have some baked in assumptions that some of these modalities are like, mildly anticorrelated? That's the thing that kinda irked me about psychology when I was studying it more seriously. The epistemic integrity of psychological research reads to me as basically castles built on sand, where people get excited about results that seem super weakly supported based on reading the paper, which is often itself laden with a ton of assumptions that don't seem justified, but people who cite them just take the conclusions the authors drew as established, build their own studies with those assumptions baked in, ad nauseum. I was not shocked at all when the replication crisis hit this field as hard as it did, and since the issue is often in the way the hypotheses are operationalized in the first place, there are inherently going to be tons of flawed studies that are hard to even detect through the heuristic of replicability.

As far as the Likert scale nonsense, I am right there with you, all these psychological instruments are pretty poorly framed from my perspective, and while there's some discourse deep in academia about the rigor of various experimental methodologies even in the most broken of social sciences, in practice they don't seem to care much because it's publish or perish baby!

It really doesn't seem like most sciences are quite this broken, though some are clearly trying. Obviously there are people in psychology trying to do good rigorous science, it seems like institutional pressures are not working to support them, and certainly won't amplify rigor over making bold claims that get a lot of press

Like, all this to say that it's definitely worth taking these things with a massive grain of salt, but if you do that, it can still be pretty interesting.

>Interesting test. I apparently am about as high as you can likely get a percentile score to go for the number of questions here on inner voice and representational manipulation, and as low as possible on mind's eye and orthographic representation

Interesting, it's the same for me. I'm 94th and 98th percentile on the first two, but 2nd and 25th percentile for the other two. Since we're both on a (primarily) science and tech oriented website, I wonder if there's any correlation between ones occupation/hobbies/skills and their method of thinking.

Also, I'm surprised to hear that I'm an extreme outlier when it comes to the mind's eye. When I think about it, even recalling the face of my partner (who I see daily, including this morning) is not easy and comes out very fuzzy. But I have no problems with imagining complex geometry, maps, navigation, etc.

Pretty close to me too. 98th percentile for Internal Verbalization, 88th percentile for Visual Imagery, average for all the others.

I'm constantly talking to myself in my head as if I'm talking to a duplicate of myself. Asking questions, providing answers, having full back and forward conversations (especially with programming). There are certainly days though where, if you have a lot going on, you can start to burn yourself out with conversation (since every single action of the day comes with a conversation). Even if it's just "Oh I should make a coffee. Did I have a coffee yet? No, I think you had one this morning. What about if I made one anyway. Yeah I think that would be fine. Oh do I need to boil water? I suppose I should check if the water is hot. Yep looks like I do have to boil some". and after a while you just get sick of talking to yourself. But you can't switch it off and it drives you a bit batty sometimes.

I asked my wife once if she constantly narrates her own day, she said absolutely no. She said she only really has an internal monologue when reading things from text. And she writes down a lot of stuff on text. But other than that, she answered confused by my question "...nothing? I guess? Quiet?"

Brains are interesting!

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