Who knows – we’d have to ask someone on the committee when they felt safe to be totally honest. Maybe they just thought it sounded cool.
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Untrue in the pedantic sense.
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The storage room of the chemistry department at the Scottish university hadn’t been properly cleaned since the facility opened in 1968
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As an academic: sounds about right.
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I normally wouldn’t touch these sorts of things with a ten foot pole (or perhaps I should say poll?), but I’ve enjoyed Maggie Koerth-Baker’s writing since her days at BB, and besides, this one is Backed By Science. Or something.
Fair warning: it’s a personality quiz. And it has a “compare your results with your friends” component.
Seriously, it sets off my this-is-totally-sketchy alarm, but it’s from 538 and they seem like a reputable enough bunch, and I just threw caution to the wind and did it anyway.
Here’s the original link: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/personality-quiz/
And here’s 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 can’t believe I took an online personality quiz, much less shared it with other people. I might be having a stroke. 
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I didn’t like it. Too many questions have situational answers. Am I quiet? That depends. How large is the group I’m 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 they’re trying to ask, and the answer that they’re looking for from me is “Very, very quiet”: 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, I’m unlikely to say much of anything, especially if they’re not close friends. But that’s reading a lot of subtext into a question which, without changing any of the verbiage, I could just as easily answer, “I’m really loud,” 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 it’s still half as many questions as the original test it’s based upon.
Edit to add: Another question I didn’t 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 I’m 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 I’ve been forced to adopt? I can’t 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.
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I am so glad you wrote that. I was the same way on those examples. I’m known for being organised at work, but at home… not so much, though I’m working on it.
The graphs in the results were interesting. It looks like – surprise! – the traits all average out if you pool enough people.
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Well, you would hope that you are being compared to the average human.
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Sure, but day the “average human” was an introvert – that would skew things.
Instead, there’s a near-equilateral triangle.
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Quire right. What I should have said is that people are probably comparing themselves to what they would consider to be average.
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My understanding is that you’re not supposed to think too hard about the questions or your answers when taking these sorts of quizzes. They’re not intended to prompt deep self-reflection, they’re 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 could’ve stopped right there, skipped all the what-ifs, and just answered “very, very quiet.”
Or at least that’s how it’s been explained to me. 
.
Well, yeah. I think that’s 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 doesn’t put people into neat personality “types,” because that’s not how personalities really work. Instead, the quiz gives you a score on five different traits […] 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 I’m understanding all this correctly) by definition, most of us are going to be average, more-or-less. Sad, but true, I’m afraid. Where things get interesting is in the differences, the outliers. And it’s 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 don’t, and the smaller sample size will mean different, more relatable, averages.
In any case, I’m not necessarily defending the methodology of this particular quiz. I’m hardly qualified to judge, so there’s a reason I posted in a thread with “possibly untrue” 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:
You’re no goody-goody, but you’re also not what the professionals might refer to as “a selfish jerk.”
and,
There are benefits and drawbacks to people on both ends of the spectrum, but if we had to choose a roommate, we’d pick you — 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? 
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The MMPI was the thing that really brought home to me the differences between the hard and social and bullshit of sciences.
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I’d 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 can’t tell if they’re 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 can’t tell if you’re saying that all personality quizzes are bullshit, or that some of them likely aren’t and the MMPI was what made you realize that. Or am I completely misunderstanding?
Also, I’m curious: did you take the quiz? 
I’ll 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 world’s scorn.
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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 that’s 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 “depending on the situation” when it comes to the introvert-extrovert scale: ambivert.
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Goddam you just described me. I always wondered why I switch back and forth. Depends a lot on comfort level, I guess, and who I’m with.
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I didn’t go to Christian schools, and I still “learned” that the story was invented to explain the different number of ribs… facepalm
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