Big 5 versus Myer-Briggs Type Indicator
Apparently I am not the only one thinking about the relations between the OCEAN tests and the MBTI. Cecil at the Straight Dope has compared the the Myers-Briggs and the Big 5.
Stats
Limitations of the Big 5
I talk a lot about the Big 5 personality factors, and how useful they are. So now it is time to discuss the problems with the Big 5. As in so many things, I am indebted to Steve Sailer for bringing these up first.
Problem 1 is cheating. A person
People who bust ass almost always do well
I was emailed an article a while by back by a friend, all about the big 5 factors of personality and success in med school. That spurred quite a discussion about the relative values of smarts and hard work, and the kinds of personalities that do well in various professions,
More detailed Big 5 test
Courtesy of Steve Hsu, I found a more detailed online Big 5 personality assessment. This one takes much longer, but it has subdomain scores that can help people delve more deeply into their personality, and stave off objections that "I'm not really like that". The Out
Steve Hsu: Information Processing
Steve Hsu is a physics professor at the University of Oregon. I stumbled across some fun things on his blog. Among my favorites:
* Learning how to fight [Our interests converge already]
* Thinking in terms of probability distributions [the most important skill in science and engineering, and life]
* Psychometrics works [I&
First Impressions
A fun open access paper about personality judgments based on seeing just a picture of someone. One of the authors is Samuel Gosling, whose work lies behind the online Big 5 personality test I recommend to the curious. You can learn a lot just by looking at someone, and in
Come back Nick Naylor, all is forgiven
A piece of contrarian science that could have come straight from the protagonist of Thank You For Smoking, The Scientific Scandal of Anti-smoking. The results of the Whitehall study cited in the article are that you don't see much difference in life expectancy between smokers who quit and