March 23, 2012 at 7:22 pm
The Blues Brothers' cop car. At night. Wearing sunglasses.
But for now, an HHR panel. Economical. Standard. Throwback, but modern.
And, alas, discontinued.
March 24, 2012 at 2:23 pm
Paul Smith-221741 (3/22/2012)
I'd be a Tank - Riding roughshod over Developers 😛
In that case I guess I would have to be a motorised 80mm cannon equipped with moder armour piercing rounds so that I could free my developers from the threat of arrogant DBAs. 😀
Currently Driving a Citroen C1 😉
Currently I drive a bottom of range Renault Clio when I'm in the UK, and whatever I can hire cheaply and conveniently when I'm elsewhere - in the last 12 months that's included everything from clapped out tinny and tiny old Fiat banger via big fat plush Citroen to fast and flashy Lotus (into which it was hard to fit self plus wife plus suitcases and laptop, amazing contrast to the tiny little Renault that carries that lot with some room to spare).
Before sort of retiring (and trading in my Ford station waggon for the Clio) I used to drive largish family cars - my favorite was a Ford Sierra 2.3 V6 manual (my wife accidentally got that up to over 100mph on a 40mph stretch once, because she had got used to driving various 0.9L Citroen 2CVs and thought that (a) because there wasn't much engine noise it couldn't be going fast and (b) it wouldn't have much more acceleration than a 2CV - fortunately she slowed down quickly when I suggested it); 2nd favorite was the trusty Ford station waggon, which survived several years of maltreatment.
But the question is what sort of car do I see myself as: that's something that changed over the years - when I was young I guess I saw myself as a Triumph TR3, later on I was a solid workhorse car (something like a 2CV) that went anywhere and carried an amazing load very cheaply, and now I guess I must be something old and clapped out like a Standard 8hp although I feel more like a somewhat decrepit cross between a dull old Rolls Royce (safe and comfortable and reliable) and a shiny new Ferrari 458 Italia (brilliant but maybe a bit too flashy). What that says about my personality I'm frightened to think. 🙂
Tom
March 24, 2012 at 9:28 pm
Heh... I guess I'd be an ambulance... because the person that asks that question really needs a quick ride to the loony bin if they think such questions will actually reveal the true personality of a psychopath or anyone else for that matter. 🙂
Ink blots anyone?
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
March 25, 2012 at 1:55 am
I sat a Myers Briggs test with my department. As an Aspie I asked if it could spot personality defects, at which point my boss started to laugh.
We were asked to react honestly to the problems put before us. By the end of it I wasn't sure if the hysteria was from laughter or "OMG I'm supposed to be his boss".
As the person in question is no longer my boss and I still see him socially I believe it was the former.
The gist of it is tha I've had 4 separate attempts at Myers Briggs and got four different results.
What I take from this is that the test is highly subjective and dependent on the skills of the person administering the test.
Interestingly enough my new boss disagreed with my formal assessment and picked exactly the same personality type for me that my wife did. Scary:w00t:
A more cynical person that I made the observation that personality tests per se are pseudo science perpetuated by HR departments in an attempt to provide a "scientific" measure for what they do.
March 25, 2012 at 1:03 pm
David.Poole (3/25/2012)
I sat a Myers Briggs test with my department. As an Aspie I asked if it could spot personality defects, at which point my boss started to laugh.We were asked to react honestly to the problems put before us. By the end of it I wasn't sure if the hysteria was from laughter or "OMG I'm supposed to be his boss".
As the person in question is no longer my boss and I still see him socially I believe it was the former.
The gist of it is tha I've had 4 separate attempts at Myers Briggs and got four different results.
What I take from this is that the test is highly subjective and dependent on the skills of the person administering the test.
Interestingly enough my new boss disagreed with my formal assessment and picked exactly the same personality type for me that my wife did. Scary:w00t:
A more cynical person that I made the observation that personality tests per se are pseudo science perpetuated by HR departments in an attempt to provide a "scientific" measure for what they do.
Whether it's highly subjective or not I have no idea, but there appears to be no evidence that the results mean anything at all (they don't enable improvements in prediction of anything to a statistically significant level) and the bumff that comes with the tests specifically disclaims any efficacy at predicting success in a particular role.
I reckon your more cynical person had it mostly right, but I would rather call Myers Briggs "mumbo-jumbo" than "pseudo science".
Tom
March 26, 2012 at 8:08 am
I've done a lot of "real" personality tests, and the vast majority of them come under the heading of a comic I once saw. It was titled "Before Astrology was a Science", and had:
Taurus: You will take vague generalities about life and work as applying specifically to you.
Gemini: You will take vague generalities about life and work as applying specifically to you.
Piscis: You will take vague generalities about life and work as applying specifically to you.
Libra: You will take vague generalities about life and work as applying specifically to you.
...
Don't take any of them too seriously.
- Gus "GSquared", RSVP, OODA, MAP, NMVP, FAQ, SAT, SQL, DNA, RNA, UOI, IOU, AM, PM, AD, BC, BCE, USA, UN, CF, ROFL, LOL, ETC
Property of The Thread
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everyone agrees it's old enough to know better." - Anon
March 26, 2012 at 10:02 am
GSquared (3/26/2012)
I've done a lot of "real" personality tests, and the vast majority of them come under the heading of a comic I once saw. It was titled "Before Astrology was a Science", and had:Taurus: You will take vague generalities about life and work as applying specifically to you.
Gemini: You will take vague generalities about life and work as applying specifically to you.
Piscis: You will take vague generalities about life and work as applying specifically to you.
Libra: You will take vague generalities about life and work as applying specifically to you.
Well, that's fairly harmless, so you must only have taken the better ones (the ones that are deliberately vague so as to avoid getting incompetent idiots elevated to responsible posts where they can do real damage and consigning competent and effective people to the dustbin).
Don't take any of them too seriously.
Maybe take the ones that say you are perfect for the job seriously, because if you do the HR department may back your bid for a pay rise :hehe:
Tom
March 26, 2012 at 3:37 pm
Harley Davidson Sportster 1200. Just cruising down a windy country road. I can feel it now......
Currently, I drive a Chevy Silverado 1500 pickup truck. Motorcycles can't pull a 4500 pound 25 foot travel trailer.
-SQLBill
March 26, 2012 at 4:10 pm
I drive a Ford Ranger, nice steady transportation. I think this year I'll finally upgrade to something bigger, mainly to accomodate the kids in the back, getting too big to cram both in the side saddle jump seats.
March 26, 2012 at 4:16 pm
I don't know how accurate any of the personality tests are, as I've taken a couple of them I often hit questions where it seems like I need to check more than one answer, and I suspects its true for many, we don't always fit cleanly into one bucket. That said, I still think it's helped me learn about me and others. Sometimes it seems like a good match, sometimes I see the mismatch, either way it makes me think about who they are and why.
The car test is just a simpler way to get there, though I won't argue it's scientific at all!
March 27, 2012 at 6:33 am
Here's why I consider professional personality tests critically flawed:
A few years back, the owner of the company I worked for decided all the employees needed to take DiSC personality tests. This is one that claims something like 95% accuracy.
You take them in groups, as part of it is a team activity. The first action is to be given a list of word choices, in sets of five, and asked which one of the five best describes you and which worst describes you. For example, the list might be: Fun, Serious, Talkative, Analytical, Decisive. You mark which one of those is "most you" and a different mark for "least you".
I was in the last group of 5 for our company. Partway through the list, one of my co-workers asked, "What's 'loquacious'?" I was the only person in the room who knew what it means, including the test administrator. For the next 15 minutes or so, I was very, very busy answering vocabulary questions. How can someone decide whether "loquacious" is "most you" or "least you" if they don't even know what it means? But over half the words on the full list were unknown to the majority of people in the room and about a fifth of the words were unknown to everyone except me.
Turned out, on review with people who had taken the test in earlier groups, they had comparable vocabularies. (Most of these people were college graduates. It wasn't that they were illiterate, it's that (a) the test assumed a much larger vocabulary than the average college graduate, and (b) I have a horrible time with spelling, but otherwise have a working vocabulary MUCH larger than that of the average college graduate.)
So, drawn by this disconnect between the testing methodology and the claims of extreme accuracy, I reviewed the final results part of the tests. It was definitely in the category of "you will take vague generalities about life and work as applying specifically to you".
At the end of the test, everyone in the company was awestruck by how "accurate" their personality profiles were. "Wow! That really does describe me!" kind of comments all over the building.
I took five of those people, picked random personality profiles out of the back of the test-grading book, and told them, "There was a mistake in your test grading. The actual profile for you is ...." and presented them with one picked entirely at random. Universally, the response was, "Oh! That makes even more sense! Thanks!" or slight variations thereon.
A few years later, a different test, this one based on "Which shape are you?" It assigns characteristics to "Circles" (people who focus on communication), "Squares" (focus on rules), "Squiggles" (focus on creativity and intuition), "Rectangles" (in transition from one approach to life to another approach), "Triangles" (focus on decisive leadership). Complex personalities are, per the authors of this testing method, combinations of these. For example, a Triangle-Circle-Squiggle is a charismatic leader - decisive, communicative, creative. Jokes about Square-Squiggles being psychotic were part of the showmanship of the presentation about this. (The presenter, one of the authors, was very entertaining and energetic.)
The whole company took the test. Almost 200 people. (Different company than the prior story.) Afterwards, I picked random people who know me fairly well, and told them I was a wide variety of shape combinations. "Yeah, I'm a Squiggle-Rectangle apparently. Creative and in-transition." to one person, and "I bet everyone already knew I was a Triangle-Circle-Square, didn't they?" to another.
No matter what combination I told someone I was, they immediately agreed that it made total sense.
I didn't do either of these things to be malicious or to provoke anyone or anything like that. I did it out of curiosity about the tests and the perceptions they create.
So, based on those experiences, and a long and detailed background in prediction of actual human behavior, I don't see any of these tests as being anything other than "asserted ego reflection". In other words, they show you what you want to see about yourself and others. Companies spend a lot of money on these things, and it's all borderline fraud in my book.
- Gus "GSquared", RSVP, OODA, MAP, NMVP, FAQ, SAT, SQL, DNA, RNA, UOI, IOU, AM, PM, AD, BC, BCE, USA, UN, CF, ROFL, LOL, ETC
Property of The Thread
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everyone agrees it's old enough to know better." - Anon
March 27, 2012 at 4:44 pm
GSquared (3/27/2012)
"What's 'loquacious'?" I was the only person in the room who knew what it means...
Mental note not to play Scrabble with you!
I've just told the wife shes loquacious and she's trying to work out if its an insult or not.
March 27, 2012 at 7:48 pm
David.Poole (3/27/2012)
GSquared (3/27/2012)
"What's 'loquacious'?" I was the only person in the room who knew what it means...Mental note not to play Scrabble with you!
I've just told the wife shes loquacious and she's trying to work out if its an insult or not.
Heh... "It Depends". She might let you live through that one but there would be no hope if you had called her a "blatherskite". 🙂
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
March 27, 2012 at 8:19 pm
GSquared (3/27/2012)
Here's why I consider professional personality tests critically flawed:A few years back, the owner of the company I worked for decided all the employees needed to take DiSC personality tests. This is one that claims something like 95% accuracy.
You take them in groups, as part of it is a team activity. The first action is to be given a list of word choices, in sets of five, and asked which one of the five best describes you and which worst describes you. For example, the list might be: Fun, Serious, Talkative, Analytical, Decisive. You mark which one of those is "most you" and a different mark for "least you".
I was in the last group of 5 for our company. Partway through the list, one of my co-workers asked, "What's 'loquacious'?" I was the only person in the room who knew what it means, including the test administrator. For the next 15 minutes or so, I was very, very busy answering vocabulary questions. How can someone decide whether "loquacious" is "most you" or "least you" if they don't even know what it means? But over half the words on the full list were unknown to the majority of people in the room and about a fifth of the words were unknown to everyone except me.
Turned out, on review with people who had taken the test in earlier groups, they had comparable vocabularies. (Most of these people were college graduates. It wasn't that they were illiterate, it's that (a) the test assumed a much larger vocabulary than the average college graduate, and (b) I have a horrible time with spelling, but otherwise have a working vocabulary MUCH larger than that of the average college graduate.)
So, drawn by this disconnect between the testing methodology and the claims of extreme accuracy, I reviewed the final results part of the tests. It was definitely in the category of "you will take vague generalities about life and work as applying specifically to you".
At the end of the test, everyone in the company was awestruck by how "accurate" their personality profiles were. "Wow! That really does describe me!" kind of comments all over the building.
I took five of those people, picked random personality profiles out of the back of the test-grading book, and told them, "There was a mistake in your test grading. The actual profile for you is ...." and presented them with one picked entirely at random. Universally, the response was, "Oh! That makes even more sense! Thanks!" or slight variations thereon.
A few years later, a different test, this one based on "Which shape are you?" It assigns characteristics to "Circles" (people who focus on communication), "Squares" (focus on rules), "Squiggles" (focus on creativity and intuition), "Rectangles" (in transition from one approach to life to another approach), "Triangles" (focus on decisive leadership). Complex personalities are, per the authors of this testing method, combinations of these. For example, a Triangle-Circle-Squiggle is a charismatic leader - decisive, communicative, creative. Jokes about Square-Squiggles being psychotic were part of the showmanship of the presentation about this. (The presenter, one of the authors, was very entertaining and energetic.)
The whole company took the test. Almost 200 people. (Different company than the prior story.) Afterwards, I picked random people who know me fairly well, and told them I was a wide variety of shape combinations. "Yeah, I'm a Squiggle-Rectangle apparently. Creative and in-transition." to one person, and "I bet everyone already knew I was a Triangle-Circle-Square, didn't they?" to another.
No matter what combination I told someone I was, they immediately agreed that it made total sense.
I didn't do either of these things to be malicious or to provoke anyone or anything like that. I did it out of curiosity about the tests and the perceptions they create.
So, based on those experiences, and a long and detailed background in prediction of actual human behavior, I don't see any of these tests as being anything other than "asserted ego reflection". In other words, they show you what you want to see about yourself and others. Companies spend a lot of money on these things, and it's all borderline fraud in my book.
Nice writeup and good examples. Reminds me of fortune tellers and the horoscope. I think my Grandfather had it right when he said "Beauty is in the eyes of the guy holding the shotgun." 😀
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
March 28, 2012 at 5:36 am
Jeff Moden (3/27/2012)
Heh... "It Depends". She might let you live through that one but there would be no hope if you had called her a "blatherskite". 🙂
How he dies would still depend. There are various etymologies for the word. Obviously it's blather + skite, but skite has several possible derivations. If she things it came from the North Germanic word skitr (which is quite probable, if it's a Scottish word or Northern English) death would be painful and long drawn out - his death would be slow and obscene. If she thinks skite is a medieval Scots word meaning "contemptible braggart" he might die less painfully. And if she thinks skite just means excessive talker (so that blatherskite just means "person who blithers too much") it would be a quick clean death or (since some wifes actually know that they waffle on far too much because they've observed the similarities when their husbands do the same) he may even survive his punishment.
Tom
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