Magic Poriferan
^He pronks, too!
- Joined
- Nov 4, 2007
- Messages
- 14,081
- MBTI Type
- Yin
- Enneagram
- One
- Instinctual Variant
- sx/sp
I was thinking again about the issue of test taking as oppose to having your type analyzed by another person/other people. It seems to be a fairly common sentiment that the former is not as viable as latter. Is there really good reason for this?
The most constantly repeated reason for being against testing is that people do not know themselves. The human mind has distorted self-perception. Well, this is undeniable. There is no way to make a test that can get around someone being sub-consciouly deceptive, or plainly ignorant of their identity.
That is a flaw of testing, but is it a flaw greater than that of personal analysis? Here's why I'm skeptical of that.
For one thing, my distorted view as a human being will come into play just as much when I'm analyzing someone else as when I'm analyzing myself. It would be preposterous to suggest that a human observing another human, can do so without any sense of bias regarding that other human. I can hardly list all the causes and forms of bias.
And yet still, there's another problem. Not only do you have to deal with your own biases when analyzing someone, you have to see through their masks too. Isn't it obvious that people don't just deceive themselves when taking tests? People let self-perception alter their behavior and what they say to people. In other words, when you're trying to analyze someone, you are getting information just as corrupted by self-perception as the test would be getting. So, if the informationr received is just as bad either way, which is better for typing someone, a person, or a computer?
Well, the computer is consistent and unbiased at least. It's may be a simpleton, but would good is the complexity of the human mind, when all it does is distort things? The way it seems to me is that if humans are so delusional that they can't accurately answer a test about themselves, how on earth can they do a better job of understanding someone else? The computerized test at least removes one degree of humanity. Isn't only one layer of human bullshit more reliable than two?
I certainly don't think the wide variety of free online tests are reliable, but that simply is because they aren't very well written and that they do not actually follow a standardized concept between each other. But I do believe, having actually looked at the professional science of making tests, that a substantially more credible test is possible.The MBTI hardly knows what a real test is.
Things like this thread are what keep reminding me of this subject. Not only these admissions to such bias damaging to my confidence in personal analysis, but the circus that has developed around typing people sometimes is also hard to respect. There are obviously a great deal of issues with tests, and things run by computers, and a human mind will always be involved to some extent, but it's not a new idea to say that some machine might do something better than people can.
Thoughts?
The most constantly repeated reason for being against testing is that people do not know themselves. The human mind has distorted self-perception. Well, this is undeniable. There is no way to make a test that can get around someone being sub-consciouly deceptive, or plainly ignorant of their identity.
That is a flaw of testing, but is it a flaw greater than that of personal analysis? Here's why I'm skeptical of that.
For one thing, my distorted view as a human being will come into play just as much when I'm analyzing someone else as when I'm analyzing myself. It would be preposterous to suggest that a human observing another human, can do so without any sense of bias regarding that other human. I can hardly list all the causes and forms of bias.
And yet still, there's another problem. Not only do you have to deal with your own biases when analyzing someone, you have to see through their masks too. Isn't it obvious that people don't just deceive themselves when taking tests? People let self-perception alter their behavior and what they say to people. In other words, when you're trying to analyze someone, you are getting information just as corrupted by self-perception as the test would be getting. So, if the informationr received is just as bad either way, which is better for typing someone, a person, or a computer?
Well, the computer is consistent and unbiased at least. It's may be a simpleton, but would good is the complexity of the human mind, when all it does is distort things? The way it seems to me is that if humans are so delusional that they can't accurately answer a test about themselves, how on earth can they do a better job of understanding someone else? The computerized test at least removes one degree of humanity. Isn't only one layer of human bullshit more reliable than two?
I certainly don't think the wide variety of free online tests are reliable, but that simply is because they aren't very well written and that they do not actually follow a standardized concept between each other. But I do believe, having actually looked at the professional science of making tests, that a substantially more credible test is possible.The MBTI hardly knows what a real test is.
Things like this thread are what keep reminding me of this subject. Not only these admissions to such bias damaging to my confidence in personal analysis, but the circus that has developed around typing people sometimes is also hard to respect. There are obviously a great deal of issues with tests, and things run by computers, and a human mind will always be involved to some extent, but it's not a new idea to say that some machine might do something better than people can.
Thoughts?