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

Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

soccermatics.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 291 posts

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#221

Post by coliveira »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #215
coliveira wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you should consider the main idea in the article: pseudo-psychology operates stating the obvious with different words, to make it sound important. The tests that you took are tautologically true, because they ask questions about you and then give one or more names to that set of responses (blue, sanguineous, etc). Moreover, you rarely get a clear answer, and the creators of these test know that is very diffic…

> Moreover, you rarely get a clear answer Weirdly enough, i actually got more than I bargained for. So whatever the pseudoscience is. It was applicable and useful to me.

That's why pseudo-science exist. Many people like it and think it is personally useful. If you feel comfort in this, congratulations.

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#222

Post by dantyti »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #149
alkonaut wrote: post #41

The interesting question here perhaps isn’t so much whether knowing if you are a particular color or 4-letter Myers-Briggs combination helps you or whether there is a solid foundation to the categorization at all. What’s interesting here is rather: what happens when you think of everyone as a pigeonholed category. Intuitively it seems it should be mostly negative especially if the categories don’t even offer any beha…

I have a friend who's tremendously into astrology. After years of arguments etc I had a moment of enlightment when I realized she practically uses it more as descriptive model rather than predictive source of truth. I. E. She used classifications for personal shorthand on how she thinks about people. From that perspective, there's a sense where a summarizing framework is beneficial. Almost every high level executive…

> Almost every high level executive I met that's actually genuinely good with people, subscribes strongly and uses a personality model - whether it's the Disc model or four quadrants or whatever.

I would say my anectdata is completely opposite after working in an organization that based its management almost exclusively on disc. The model allowed managers to completely ignore the vast majority of people issues ("ah, those two have a D in their profile, of course they're gonna butt heads"). The managers who were actually good with people never relied on any pseudoscientific crutch to analyse, communicate or mediate conflict, and imo that's what made them _good with people_.

This part of the article resonated strongly with the issues I saw and how over reliance on personality models sabotaged the organization:

> A common mistake when problems occur within an organisation is to focus on the individuals that are involved in conflicts. In fact, since it is the context of a situation which decides how people act, the primary concern in addressing any conflict should lie in how the organisation works. Before an organisation consultant, brought in to resolve conflicts, looks at individuals she should look at the structure (Olofsson & Nilsson, 2015).

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#223

Post by alkonaut »

Terretta wrote: post #133
alkonaut wrote: post #41

The interesting question here perhaps isn’t so much whether knowing if you are a particular color or 4-letter Myers-Briggs combination helps you or whether there is a solid foundation to the categorization at all. What’s interesting here is rather: what happens when you think of everyone as a pigeonholed category. Intuitively it seems it should be mostly negative especially if the categories don’t even offer any beha…

> But * something * tells me that there could also be some positive effects from actually wondering about the behavior of others and how you treat them, even if it’s pigeonholing and preconceptions based on bogus research. The article. The article told you that: “Maybe the only positive thing that can be said about Erikson’s theory is that it might help some people realise that not everyone thinks the same way they d…

I mean it would be interesting to see some scientific insight on what the effects of pigeonholing is.

I’m ready to agree with the author of the article here but his conclusion isn’t exactly more scientific than the book he’s writing about.

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#225

Post by capableweb »

Retric wrote: post #114
retrac wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say "under 8% of the population" having a copy of the book as if that doesn't make it almost as popular as the Bible.

There’s been roughly 1 copy of the Bible printed per person alive on the earth. Not all of them are still around, but it’s likely there is still at least 1 copy per 2 people.

According to Statista, 85% of Swedes self-identify as either "non-practicing Christians" or "religiously unaffiliated", unlikely they have a bible at home if that's accurate. "Church-attending Christians" come up as 8%, and are likely to have a bible at home. "almost as popular as the Bible" seems, if Statista is right, very likely.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/909409/religious-identif...

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#226

Post by analog31 »

mherdeg wrote: post #169
teekert wrote: post #7

I went through the Insights Discovery course [0], which sounds a lot like what tfa is discrediting. At work we still talk about the colors of people years after the course. After reading tfa I still feel that there is value in this system, but mostly wrt awareness. The course recognizes a spectrum and everyone has aspects of all colors. Many people at my employer are primarily green or blue. During the courses it cam…

I took what is probably the same all-day training course with my extended team at Microsoft about 10 years ago. I had some deep qualms about this -- "this cannot possibly have any scientific basis, right? What is the point of this? How can anyone possibly assert that there are four basic kinds of personalities, that they respond consistently, or that they way they interact matches consistently?" A colleague's view wa…

People may also be concerned that there's a sinister purpose for the test, e.g., for screening.

I was skimming through a translation of Seneca, and in the opening dialog, the participants come to an agreement, along the lines of: "Just to get things straight, we're talking about the real stuff that the philosophers believe in, not the crap that the people believe in, right?" The subject matter had to do with death and the afterlife.

The thing that interests me is that someone's view on the purpose of the test might actually bias their answers and thus the results as well. So even if the test was valid in a controlled research or clinical setting, in a business setting it's a different test. Is intelligence a confounding variable?

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#227

Post by dantyti »

aidenn0 wrote: post #157
alkonaut wrote: post #41

The interesting question here perhaps isn’t so much whether knowing if you are a particular color or 4-letter Myers-Briggs combination helps you or whether there is a solid foundation to the categorization at all. What’s interesting here is rather: what happens when you think of everyone as a pigeonholed category. Intuitively it seems it should be mostly negative especially if the categories don’t even offer any beha…

From TFA: > Maybe the only positive thing that can be said about Erikson’s theory is that it might help some people realise that not everyone thinks the same way they do. Psychologists call this “theory of mind”, an ability to change perspective, which usually develops in early childhood. In other words, Erikson’s book might help someone with the empathetic and intellectual level of a five-year-old. Which sounds abou…

>Imagine if there was a shitshow at work, and the post-mortem determined that it was because the tech lead was a Capriocorn and the engineering lead was an Aries.

You have no idea how close to reality this description is for my former workplace that based its management on the disc model.

"Oh, the product lead and some specialists are having conflicts? Surely it is because of those arbitrary letters they got on that pseudoscientific test, and not some structural issues in our organization"

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#228

Post by capableweb »

wwilim wrote: post #9

Anything that boils an entire branch of science down to something this simple is by definition a scam. The funniest part of the article was how Forbes lists this as a top ten must-read. And why wouldn't it, removing all nuance and operating on big words invented by an "expert" is peak C-level thinking. Finally, I feel obliged to point out that the four types described are essentially the Houses of Hogwarts with the c…

> Anything that boils an entire branch of science down to something this simple is by definition a scam.

Well, is it? Is it not be definition "abstraction" rather than "scam"? A scam would involve to purposefully obfuscate the truth or outright lying.

Creating simpler rules around something difficult in order to explain a lot is how a lot of science progresses. Wasn't that what Newton/Einstein or someone else did regarding physics, in order to explain how things work in our universe? Before that we had lots of difficult rules and exceptions, while they come up with something clean that could explain a lot of things instead.

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#229

Post by SiempreViernes »

ahelwer wrote: post #207
whimsicalism wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> human nature (if there is such a thing) has remained unchanged for at least as long as there has been writing I've seen statements of this sort very frequently - ie. that the "behaviorally modern" human evolved tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago. I'm curious what the backing of such claims are. It seems profoundly unintuitive to me that human behavior would remain evolutionarily unchanged over tens to hundr…

If the wisdom of the classics stopped being applicable to modern times then they would die out and stop being read. So, only the observations remain that are most stable, general, and enduring over time.

The power of the classic is largely in being pliable enough to be read in new ways by successive generations, if taken litteraly Plato obviously has nothing to say about downvote etiquette.

Re: Swedes were fooled by one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time (2020)

#230

Post by zppln »

I remember some colleagues at work labeling me as a blue person a few years ago. I didn't pay much attention to it, as it came from the types of people you'd expect taking this kind of bait.

I think the interesting thing here is how stuff like this spread through society. Or, parts of middle class society that is. We appear to have a large number of HR people, middle management and ambitious LinkedIn men who spend their time with things like this rather than doing actually useful work. Kind of like the class of useless people sent off on that space ship in HGTTG.

Post reply on HN