I think it depends on what the test is actually measuring—and the phrase ‘personality type’ doesn’t seem to be descriptive enough to be useful in determining that.
If my earlier 10-second assessment turns out to be right, and the test is measuring which types of bias people are most prone to, then a high overlap in ‘personality types’ could be an indication that the people here tend to have significant shared blind spots and thus a lower-than-ideal chance of noticing them in each other. If it’s measuring something that’s not relevant to rationality, I don’t think the overlap matters, but I’d also be somewhat surprised to see a high overlap in test results in that case: I don’t predict that the people here have a high level of similarity in results on the love style test, because affection-awareness isn’t something that’s relevant here in any way that I can see, but people who are interested in rationality but prone to different biases, and less prone to the (hypothetical) set that we share, would probably not stick around in a place that has flaws that are obvious to them, so selection bias seems relevant in that case, and would have the observed result.
Of course, it could also be that ‘personality type’ somehow results in more or less interest in rationality, rather than being caused by something that’s relevant to rationality. Figuring out what the test is actually measuring should hopefully clear that up. (I suspect that the kind of selection bias that I mentioned does happen, though, even if it’s not related to the MB test—I follow the blogs of several people online who are interested in rationality in completely different ways than we are here, and who I predict would feel quite unwelcome here for reasons that are only tangentially related to actual quality of thought.)
I don’t think just linking to the blogs would be useful, and I predict that it’ll take a thousand words or more to explain what aspects of them I’m referring to—for one thing, I’m using a rather broader (but in my experience, more useful) definition of ‘rationality’, which I’d need to explain. I’ll work on it.
What consequences does this have for the Less Wrong community? Are we missing out on something because we don’t have more personality types here?
I think it depends on what the test is actually measuring—and the phrase ‘personality type’ doesn’t seem to be descriptive enough to be useful in determining that.
If my earlier 10-second assessment turns out to be right, and the test is measuring which types of bias people are most prone to, then a high overlap in ‘personality types’ could be an indication that the people here tend to have significant shared blind spots and thus a lower-than-ideal chance of noticing them in each other. If it’s measuring something that’s not relevant to rationality, I don’t think the overlap matters, but I’d also be somewhat surprised to see a high overlap in test results in that case: I don’t predict that the people here have a high level of similarity in results on the love style test, because affection-awareness isn’t something that’s relevant here in any way that I can see, but people who are interested in rationality but prone to different biases, and less prone to the (hypothetical) set that we share, would probably not stick around in a place that has flaws that are obvious to them, so selection bias seems relevant in that case, and would have the observed result.
Of course, it could also be that ‘personality type’ somehow results in more or less interest in rationality, rather than being caused by something that’s relevant to rationality. Figuring out what the test is actually measuring should hopefully clear that up. (I suspect that the kind of selection bias that I mentioned does happen, though, even if it’s not related to the MB test—I follow the blogs of several people online who are interested in rationality in completely different ways than we are here, and who I predict would feel quite unwelcome here for reasons that are only tangentially related to actual quality of thought.)
I am interested. Could you give some examples of those blogs, and possibly describe in what way their approach is completely different?
I don’t think just linking to the blogs would be useful, and I predict that it’ll take a thousand words or more to explain what aspects of them I’m referring to—for one thing, I’m using a rather broader (but in my experience, more useful) definition of ‘rationality’, which I’d need to explain. I’ll work on it.
Do you still hold these ideas? Have you managed to work them out in detail in the meantime?