Untrue in the pedantic sense.
The storage room of the chemistry department at the Scottish university hadnât been properly cleaned since the facility opened in 1968
As an academic: sounds about right.
I normally wouldnât touch these sorts of things with a ten foot pole (or perhaps I should say poll?), but Iâve enjoyed Maggie Koerth-Bakerâs writing since her days at BB, and besides, this one is Backed By Science. Or something.
Fair warning: itâs a personality quiz. And it has a âcompare your results with your friendsâ component.
Seriously, it sets off my this-is-totally-sketchy alarm, but itâs from 538 and they seem like a reputable enough bunch, and I just threw caution to the wind and did it anyway.
Hereâs the original link: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/personality-quiz/
And hereâs the one to use if you want to compare your results to other members of the BBS (which is, so far, only me). https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/personality-quiz/?group=-LWUEoC6hvdtq_dPdnPY
I still canât believe I took an online personality quiz, much less shared it with other people. I might be having a stroke. 
I didnât like it. Too many questions have situational answers. Am I quiet? That depends. How large is the group Iâm in? How well do I know them? Are we meeting in a professional or a social capacity? Where are we meeting? What is the predominant activity?
I think I get what theyâre trying to ask, and the answer that theyâre looking for from me is âVery, very quietâ: I generally limit myself to pleasantries with strangers, and, in a group larger than 3 or 4 people, meeting for a social event in a crowded, loud place, Iâm unlikely to say much of anything, especially if theyâre not close friends. But thatâs reading a lot of subtext into a question which, without changing any of the verbiage, I could just as easily answer, âIâm really loud,â because I have theatrical training and I have pipes when I want to.
Plus, half of the questions are repeats phrased in the negative, and itâs still half as many questions as the original test itâs based upon.
Edit to add: Another question I didnât like was about cleanliness. I have a serious tendency towards messiness and disorganization. However, when I try to live like that, it has a serious negative impact in my life, so Iâm constantly fighting against my nature by cleaning and organizing, so that I can be functional, and right now, my house is (more or less) spotless. Which answer do they want: my natural tendencies, or the habits Iâve been forced to adopt? I canât tell, and the answers would be on the opposite ends of the scale.
Those are the two (well, four, because each question is asked twice) that stand out most strongly, but I remember finding these kind of ambiguous questions up and down the quiz.
I am so glad you wrote that. I was the same way on those examples. Iâm known for being organised at work, but at home⌠not so much, though Iâm working on it.
The graphs in the results were interesting. It looks like â surprise! â the traits all average out if you pool enough people.
Well, you would hope that you are being compared to the average human.
Sure, but day the âaverage humanâ was an introvert â that would skew things.
Instead, thereâs a near-equilateral triangle.
Quire right. What I should have said is that people are probably comparing themselves to what they would consider to be average.
My understanding is that youâre not supposed to think too hard about the questions or your answers when taking these sorts of quizzes. Theyâre not intended to prompt deep self-reflection, theyâre meant to provoke an emotional reaction, a sort of pre-rational-thought self-assessment.
So in your example, when you say you knew what they were trying to ask, I think you couldâve stopped right there, skipped all the what-ifs, and just answered âvery, very quiet.â
Or at least thatâs how itâs been explained to me. 
.
Well, yeah. I think thatâs intentional, or at least inherent in their explanation of why this quiz is different from others and not junk science. FTA (emphasis mine):
First, the Big Five doesnât put people into neat personality âtypes,â because thatâs not how personalities really work. Instead, the quiz gives you a score on five different traits [âŚ] Every trait is graded on a spectrum, with a few people far out on the extremes and a lot of people in the middle.
So (assuming Iâm understanding all this correctly) by definition, most of us are going to be average, more-or-less. Sad, but true, Iâm afraid. Where things get interesting is in the differences, the outliers. And itâs probably also why they have an option to compare yourself to a smaller, self-selected, cohort. People we know are more interesting than people we donât, and the smaller sample size will mean different, more relatable, averages.
In any case, Iâm not necessarily defending the methodology of this particular quiz. Iâm hardly qualified to judge, so thereâs a reason I posted in a thread with âpossibly untrueâ in its title, I suppose. 
But I will say that I am starting to get the appeal of these things. I suspect that we bring a lot of ourselves into the interpretation of any sufficiently vague statement, but even so, when I read things like:
Youâre no goody-goody, but youâre also not what the professionals might refer to as âa selfish jerk.â
and,
There are benefits and drawbacks to people on both ends of the spectrum, but if we had to choose a roommate, weâd pick you â someone in the middle.
I actually recognize and feel a little bit better about myself. I mean, being regarded as a good roommate is kind of a big deal, ya know? 
The MMPI was the thing that really brought home to me the differences between the hard and social and bullshit of sciences.
Iâd never heard of the MMPI before, but when I looked it up it seems like some sort of precursor to the Big Five, although I canât tell if theyâre meant to be directly related, or just the difference between what psychologists were thinking about before and after the availability of computing resources for statistical analysis.
And now that I think about it, I canât tell if youâre saying that all personality quizzes are bullshit, or that some of them likely arenât and the MMPI was what made you realize that. Or am I completely misunderstanding?
Also, Iâm curious: did you take the quiz? 
Iâll just say that when I was taking personality quizzes, the computaltional massagement was more straightforward. Transparent even.
Thread. I commend all these people for being open about the misinformation they were given.
But anyone who taught them this BS wilfully⌠they deserve the full brunt of the worldâs scorn.
Even there, it depends what you are looking at. My desk is a fucking disaster. But when someone needs data on something, I am usually the one to find it (or the one who actually thought ahead to gather it, but thatâs a whole story). And I had to give up the filing ss too stressful, because it seems too many people have difficulty with the concepts of numerical and alphabetical order. Which meant that the files I had set up so you could find things in seconds took a lot longer to search through.
Though I have heard a great term for âdepending on the situationâ when it comes to the introvert-extrovert scale: ambivert.
Goddam you just described me. I always wondered why I switch back and forth. Depends a lot on comfort level, I guess, and who Iâm with.
I didnât go to Christian schools, and I still âlearnedâ that the story was invented to explain the different number of ribs⌠facepalm
I vaguely remember this from Sunday school. It seems like itâs been what everyone knows for a long time. A good subject for a historical-linguistic inquiry.