I found myself geuinely confused by the question “You are a certain kind of person, and there’s not much that can be done either way to really change that”—not by the general vagueness of the statement (which I assume is all part of the fun) but by a very specific issue, the word “you”. Is it “you” as in me? Or “you” as in “one”, i.e. a hypothetical person essentially referring to everyone? I interpreted it the first way then changed my mind after reading the subsequent questions which seemed to be more clearly using it the second way.
(Dan from CFAR here) - That question (and the 3 similar ones) came from a standard psychology scale. I think the question is intentionally ambiguous between “you in particular” and “people in general”—the longer version of the scale includes some questions that are explicitly about each, and some others that are vaguely in the middle. They’re meant to capture people’s relatively intuitive impressions.
You can find more information about the questions by googling, although (as with the calibration question) it’s better if that information doesn’t show up in the recent comments feed, since scales like this one are often less valid measures for people who know what they’re intended to measure.
I answered that section quickly and on the basis of intuition in the hope that those questions were chosen because there is some interesting cognitive bias affecting the answers that I was unaware of. :D
I found myself geuinely confused by the question “You are a certain kind of person, and there’s not much that can be done either way to really change that”—not by the general vagueness of the statement (which I assume is all part of the fun) but by a very specific issue, the word “you”. Is it “you” as in me? Or “you” as in “one”, i.e. a hypothetical person essentially referring to everyone? I interpreted it the first way then changed my mind after reading the subsequent questions which seemed to be more clearly using it the second way.
(Dan from CFAR here) - That question (and the 3 similar ones) came from a standard psychology scale. I think the question is intentionally ambiguous between “you in particular” and “people in general”—the longer version of the scale includes some questions that are explicitly about each, and some others that are vaguely in the middle. They’re meant to capture people’s relatively intuitive impressions.
You can find more information about the questions by googling, although (as with the calibration question) it’s better if that information doesn’t show up in the recent comments feed, since scales like this one are often less valid measures for people who know what they’re intended to measure.
I answered that section quickly and on the basis of intuition in the hope that those questions were chosen because there is some interesting cognitive bias affecting the answers that I was unaware of. :D