Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 340 posts

Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

#151

Post by banads »

Symmetry wrote: post #89
Vomzor wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may in fact make things worse. >The Implicit Association Test has been used in online studies to assess implicit racial attitudes in over seven million participants. Although typically used as an assessment measure, results from four pre-registered experiments (N = 940) demonstrated that completing a Race IAT exacerbates the negative implicit attitudes that it seeks to assess. Increases in White participants’ nega…

This might be an aspect of the same problem that DARE had. If you castigate some act but at the same time speak in a way that says that act is common then the effect of making it seem normal will tend to trump the disapproval.

>the effect of making it seem normal will tend to trump the disapproval.

I think it may be more due to the fact that people have a natural disinclination towards people pretending to be moral authorities, especially when their premise is revealed to be based on lies and pseudoscience

Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

#152

Post by jessermeyer »

feintruled wrote: post #58
jessermeyer wrote: post #20

I am more analytic than most of my friends. If you want to label that as "Blue" or "7" or "J", "Conscientiousness" or "Engineer", that's one way to represent the general classification. And it's useful, especially when used as some kind of mirror for reflection. Whether it's useful in sum across a population to answer specific questions like "Will this specific group of people work well together" is highly suspect. T…

> Categories, while a necessary first step to understanding, ultimately become a trap if that's all you understand people as. And perhaps a trap for yourself too, if you find yourself saying things like "I could never do something like that, I'm a blue!"

Some guitarists never learn to play beyond the scales they first learned.

Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

#154

Post by bjourne »

growlist wrote: post #129
bjourne wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me ask you something: Is unconscious bias training the worst example of bullshit you have experienced in your professional life or the thing that has aggravated you the most? Does that tell you anything about your unconscious biases? The point of the training is for companies to absolve themselves of culpability. If you act like a jerk after unconscious bias training you are on your own and the company hopes that…

I didn't act like a jerk before the training, never mind after :) I had training called 'cultural awareness' or similar at another company which was basically very similar material, but without the bogus claims that it was rooted in science. It's the latter that I object to - if they are going to enforce behavioural standards just be honest about it, rather than gaslighting people with this arrant nonsense that we're…

The bullshit I've had to endure during my career includes "You're one of our best paid engineers, so don't share salary information with your colleagues.", "NDA means you can not take a job at a competing company for six months after your resignation." and "It is important that your back is towards me (the manager) so that I can see your monitor and ensure that you are working at all times."

My point is that even if unconscious bias training is 100% bullshit, it is among the most benign forms of business bullshit I've experienced. Thus, I cannot understand why it is so upsetting to so many.

Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

#155

Post by cgriswald »

darepublic wrote: post #38
dgellow wrote: post #9

> · Red: dominant, driven, solution focussed. > · Blue: analytic, careful, meticulous > · Green: patient, considerate, nice > · Yellow: extroverted, creative, verbal Damn. I spent so much of my time and energy pushing back exactly on this bullshit when I was young. That's part of the curriculum of mandatory courses I had to take during an apprenticeship in Switzerland. Expensive and mandatory courses paid by students…

I took this stuff in an introductory college course. I kind of knew it was bs but it was also easy to understand and score an easy mark. Sometimes it just doesn't pay to tell the emperor they have no clothes.

> Sometimes it just doesn't pay to tell the emperor they have no clothes.

Indeed.

I worked a job in which I worked more hours than my coworkers and was (measurably) more productive on a per hour basis than my coworkers. I loved my job, the people in other departments loved it when I worked because things got done that they needed, and I always had a smile on my face.

But I had a "bad attitude" because I objected to similar nonsense.

Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

#156

Post by mattkrause »

tomp wrote: post #42

> Unfortunately, the theory behind this book, and the various follow-ups, is no more than pseudoscientific nonsense. And Erikson appears to lack even basic knowledge of psychology or behavioural science. This seems to happen often. Are there any non-pseudoscientific psychology theories? AFAIK only IQ and (possibly) the "Big Five" personality traits. Short list of (likely) "failed" (pop-)psychological theories: - ster…

You’re looking too narrowly: psychology is much bigger than social psych, and a lot of the sensory or perceptual stuff has held up astonishingly well.

In addition the things NPMaxwell listed, consider these theories/ideas: Weber/Fechner’s law, parallel vs. serial visual search, categorical perception, attentional selection, semantic priming, the coarticulation of phonemes, spatial frequency channels, and properties of sensory receptors, to name a few.

Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

#158

Post by _pzof »

csours wrote: post #109
fredrik-j wrote: post #52

As a swede this is a bit embarrassing to me. I have a few friends who's bought into this completely, and of course bought the book. All without even a hint of critical thinking. It is hard to tell your friends they've been conned. I can understand it to some extent. Here's someone, who claims he is a behavioral expert and scientist, and who offers a seemingly plausible simple method to understand yourself and other p…

Well, some/many Japanese believe that blood type determines a lot about your personality, and Americans believe in Myers-Briggs types, and I'm sure there are local equivalents everywhere else too, so I wouldn't worry about it too much.

I am an American who does not “believe” in Myers-Briggs types and I know plenty more of the same.

Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

#159

Post by Miraste »

FranOntanaya wrote: post #116
lemagedurage wrote: post #33

How come dividing personality into introverted and extroverted (1 dimension) is generally accepted, but dividing personality into more dimensions (disc has 2, mbti has 4, big five has 5, etc), people tend to feel uneasy (e. g. "I am more than just this")? All traps aside (confirmation bias, overdoing it), I do believe these categorizations do make sense as a way to learn about behavior, especially for the general pub…

I look at MBTI as a hash function. Rather than having someone ask a few dozen questions about myself and me answering them and them putting them together, it's simpler to hash those answers into a 4 letter string. People with some big differences do get the same hash value, but the loss of accuracy seems an acceptable trade-off in casual situations.

Hash functions are repeatable. MBTI types are not--people often receive different results when retaking the test, even in short time periods. It categories are not based on research about significant aspects of personality, and often go against it. The Big Five personality test is a scientifically grounded one that actually works as you describe, and with less loss of accuracy.

Re: How Swedes were fooled by the book “Surrounded by Idiots”

#160

Post by mattkrause »

krick wrote: post #48
tomp wrote: post #42

> Unfortunately, the theory behind this book, and the various follow-ups, is no more than pseudoscientific nonsense. And Erikson appears to lack even basic knowledge of psychology or behavioural science. This seems to happen often. Are there any non-pseudoscientific psychology theories? AFAIK only IQ and (possibly) the "Big Five" personality traits. Short list of (likely) "failed" (pop-)psychological theories: - ster…

The likes of the author of the article will surely claim that there are, but that's what another "expert" few years/decades from now will be writing review on.

We’ve known about the Purkinje Effect, which causes reds to appear darker in dim light, for over 200 years, and molecular and circuit mechanisms are now pretty well understood.

I’d bet a kidney we still believe it in another 20 years.

Post reply on HN