The #myths of computing are deep stories about the nature of problems, the workings of the human mind, and the politics of technology. They mislead us and distort what we can talk about when we talk about the role of computing in sustainability and justice.
#MyersBriggs#PersonalityTests is popular and that is about the only thing it has going for it. In reality it is no better than rolling die and assigning people a personality profile based on the die roll.
Carl Jung's ideas are at the base of the test. Unfortunately Jung's work has never been empirically tested. Hint when your base level construct is unsound you might have a train wreck on your hands.
Not Stable/Repeatable - with a reliable test I should be able to give the test once and a few weeks later give you the same test and get the same result. Myers Briggs not so much.
Predictive Value - a useful test should predict outcomes in the real world. MBTI has no predictive value.
Forced Questions - the test asks questions that force you have a binary answer, yet human personality is better measured on a continuum.
Poorly selected boundaries - 16 Personality types doesn't come close to covering all of humanity, so these 16 are arbitrarily selected buckets.
Median split to select the boundaries. People close the median might further away from the people they're classified with than the people just the other side of the median.
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…Example I might score 55% Thinker and someone else 40%. I will be bucketed as Thinking and the other person as a Feeling. Yet we're closer together, than we're to the extremes of our buckets.
MBTI ignores Neuroticism - a trait that is an important predictor of career, health and romantic outcomes.
Why do people think the results of the MBTI tells themselves something meaningful about themselves or their team?
The descriptions are generally vague and all of them are flattering. This called the Barnum or Forer effect. A fortune teller, Astrologer etc makes a vague statement that could apply to many/most people. The listener is pleasantly surprised to hear things that apply to them. Result they start to see themselves reflected in the test.
Finally when these tests are used inside organizations to hire etc, they can weed out neurodivergent people.
#SelfSuffiency#myths, on a closer look they might just be one more way to sell a ”me against the world” hero myth for folks that want nothing more than be #heroes
The boring reality being: We are a pack species, we have evolved to do our best problem-solving communally.
For those of you who have a soft spot for Cassandra in Greek mythology:
There is at least one Classical source that claims that she survived, and that she - along with her twin brother Helenus, her mother Queen Hecuba, and Hector's widow Andromache - started a new life in Chersonesus.
From time to time the hosts of some of my favourite podcasts mention Will Power/Ego Depletion, citing the work of Roy Baumeister. It may not be common knowledge but the original work fails replication. As I document in this note sharing the theory has negative consequences since people believe they have limited will power. I'm pasting my notes on the subject from my Obsidian vault. These are rough and ready, they've not even been polished by Grammarly.
What is this #podcast about?
All things #constellations! Each month we explore the #astronomy and #myths of one of the #IAU constellations. We talk about cool #space stuff (with a bias toward #BlackHoles & #exoplanets) as well as analyzing & retelling the myths of the night sky (a segment we like to call ret-con…stellations)
100 Things Popular Science Thinks Science Got Wrong, but Didn’t Quite
I was in the grocery checkout line a few weeks ago. I sometimes scan the magazine rack impulse grabs but never buy them. This week, the crop circle cover photo of a special edition of Popular Science caught my attention: Mistakes and Hoaxes – 100 Things Science Got Wrong
What did science get wrong about crop circles? “Science” (be wary of the tone of generality used in the title) never assumed there was anything worthwhile about crop circles. They were a man-made (and quite nifty) phenomenon. Thumbing through the issue, I saw pages about phrenology, cigarettes are good for you, bloodletting, humans evolved from apes, and so on – topics that may appear to have once had scientific backing. But several other standard hoaxes were cited in the list – spirit photography, alien autopsy, Loch Ness Monster, King Tut’s curse…
So, it was a mishmash of rejected thinking, errors, and hoaxes but not everything had to do with science. Lots of these “myths” were popular in the public or the media but gained zero traction as legitimate science. I bought it to see how these popular myths (if not popular “science”) were treated. It was a mixed bag.
The issue, considered a Time Inc. Book, priced at $13.99 is a snazzy coffee table edition. Each “myth” takes up one page or less. It’s well illustrated and a casual read for those who are not specialists in science. I would recommend it to those who find science stuff interesting but don’t have a formal background in it. As with typical “popular science”, specialists will find plenty of nits to pick in the text. But overall, it’s not flawed except in the egregiously wrong title. There was no introduction or editor’s note, the content started immediately with Myth #1: Neutrinos Are Faster Than Light – a legitimate story that described how an experiment went awry.
Continuing on, the title nagged at me. Science gets plenty wrong because it’s done by people who make lots of mistakes and because it’s insanely difficult to tease out the actual answer from messy data.
It’s not the most prudent thing to do for a pro-science publication to boldly suggest on the cover that science was wrong about crop circles (or time travel, the vaccine-autism link, or that humans and dinosaurs co-existed) because that’s deceptive and degrading to the scientific community who coalesced around a conservative consensus for those questions. There was NEVER solid support for such things. A few fringe scientists, but more often some pseudoscientific non-scientists, may have blown a lot of hot air about their pet ideas but that didn’t make them true and it didn’t make it “science”. I wished Popular Science would have picked up on that.
Science needs cheerleaders. Smart ones. We don’t need science porn like the “I Fucking Love Science” website or sciencey crap television like Ghost Hunters and Finding Bigfoot. We need to cultivate genuine science appreciation through showing why science is the best way of knowing nature that humans have devised. Nothing is totally reliable but science is self-correcting and continues to approximate what we might reasonably consider the “truth”. In a way, this issue gets there but the path has several pitfalls and cul de sacs.
Scientists did at one time give some credence to Piltdown Man, photographic memory, stress-causing ulcers, and spontaneous generation, then ditched them. There are many examples here of that sort of correction. Alchemy morphed into chemistry. Astrology begat astronomy. So perhaps the title could have been 100 Things Science Rejected. Or 100 Things Science Soundly Skewered. No, that probably wouldn’t have sold very well but it would have been more on point.
As with any list, we can quibble with what was included and not included. For example, War of the Worlds “mass panic” had nothing really to do with science but with the media so it shouldn’t have been in here. Neither should the bit on Dihydrogen Monoxide or Mrs. Toft repeatedly giving birth to various animal parts. They were interesting stories but not on theme.
I’m a bit annoyed that some non-scientific topics are in here at all because, just by being there, they get a small jolt of credibility – the moon landing hoax, pyramids on the moon, dowsing, chemtrails and the Atacama alien – even though they are discredited. This bullshit would be better off ignored here.
On the other hand, this is an opportunity to inject some skeptical thinking into the mainstream. I enjoyed looking for familiar names throughout. Some name-dropped skeptics included Dr. Darren Naish (Loch Ness Monster), Dr. Stuart Robbins and Dr. Phil Plait (Pyramids on the Moon), and yours truly (Bigfoot). (I did not know I was mentioned in it until I actually read that entry. SURPRISE!) The emphasis on uncovering hoaxes, calling out pseudoscience, and promoting sound evidence over bad shows me that the skeptical voice is greatly needed and appreciated in society even if it doesn’t always seem so. I’m encouraged by that. We are being heard, read, and referred to, not vilified!
In some entries, they highlighted fiction that enhanced the myth – Megalodon’s Discovery Channel fake documentary, the spaghetti tree April Fools Joke, the Jackalope creation, and the blunder of a fossil collector and National Geographic who didn’t listen to paleontologists who said archaeoraptor (“Piltdown chicken”) was a doctored fake. (D’OH!)
Indeed, many of the entries show how scientists doubted the initial claim and eventually ferreted out the truth – N-Rays, cold fusion, flying bumblebees and the planet Vulcan. Perhaps the title was a way of drawing in readers who are interested in this sort of thing who may actually learn something and consider science more valuable than before.
All in all, this publication is a fun, interesting read, flawed, but informative for the science-enthusiast average American. We need more good science stories for the public. And just like scientific endeavors, it won’t be perfect but it is worthwhile.