Your personality?

[Adrianis]

Response for YC, thoughtfully represented in spoiler form to minimise building of walls

Spoiler below!

But how are the percentages that much different than what you said, that how a person acts is relevant to the situation they're in? I don't see a person acting infinitely different to any given scenario (though, mostly since it is physically impossible for them to do so). The conscious is always the starting point for human action. We know that the conscious is capable of human feelings, but we also know that it is capable of avoiding human feelings. We know that a person will not act without the desire to do so. Etc. The personality types imply these things.

I don't understand this paragraph... The percentages are what they are, arbitrary numbers attempting to assign a discrete value to what is, as far as we know, an analogue system. There are not infinite possibilties for actions, but again you are talking about actions and not personalities - there are of course not an infinate number of permutations for an action, but there are potentially an infinite number of slight variations between 54% and 55% Introvert (as the test defines it), such as 54.5, 54.555, 54.9458374235243525 etc ad nauseum. This is why I say the tests can be interesting but are not an accurate way of deriving personality, in addition to the inherant innaccuracy of self reported data as Chronofox pointed out

I also take issue with your assertion that 'The conscious is always the starting point for human action', if you know that then you should write a paper on it and become extraordinarily famous for having worked out the origin of human action. How do you account for split-second instinctual actions?

I realize your arguments concern mostly the personality tests, which i would agree suffer from artificiality, since they do not cover every single possibility of human action and simply touch on minor social interactions. However, my arguments do not concern the tests themselves, since it was not these tests that brought about the personality types which these tests themselves are based on.

Therein lies the problem. I am talking about personalities and the tests that try to uncover them, and why we can't see the personality from the action. You are talking about human behavior, of which personality is a part, and you seem to be inferring the personality from the action. I have stated previously that I have no problem with personalities or the words we apply to them.

The inability to change that i spoke about is the process that generates action from a person ..... etc

Apologies for splitting your speech previously - my points were relevant to a specific part so I split your comment for readability. Anyone who wants the original in full, please see YC's comment.

What you don't seem to be accepting here is that the process itself changes, as the environment around the person changes - new variables come into play that were not relevant before - such as a decision on whether to eat being affected by a famine, having family members to provide for etc.
However, the entire following paragraph is referring desires as a driving force for action, not how it relates to personality or how personality factors into an action. It is worth noting that desires do indeed change with age - perhaps they always existed, but at certain ages certain desires are not factored into the decision making process.

I do not understand what you mean by action/non-action. If I understand the context correctly, that is, things a human can do, there is no 'non-action', everything is an observable action with - albeit unclear - motivations, even sitting down and 'doing nothing'

Perhaps not an all-encompassing full understanding, but i would assume certainly full understanding on the matter at the time, where both parties are willing to share complete information. Indeed, communication is an issue, but i wouldn't claim any language barrier to be the reason but the unwillingness to share information itself. This communication is what will grant us the knowledge behind the thought process. The fact that a third party may act differently would be irrelevant to the two active parties, since the third party is not the one being observed (except perhaps at a later time). I would figure that over a thousand years of communication would generate very reliable material.

The problem is that the data will remain unsatisfactory in that the validity cannot be certified, without mathematical accuracy the results are not reliable. It seems to be enough for many psychologists for sure, but they are in a position where quantifiable facts are currently not available, and therein lies my problem with it. Research is cool, but we can't rely on something like this test to tell us what our personalities are.

That (the entire paragraph) is the primary reason why i say people act logically. To a much lesser degree, another reason would be because they themselves thought their actions were logical at the time--but this lesser degree can be discarded safely in many cases. However, since we know that what they thought they were doing was logical, we know that it is not impossible for us to figure out what was going through their mind at the time even though their actions, in hindsight, were in fact illogical.

Do we know that they thought their actions were logical? How? Could they even explain how a logical conclusion is made? Even if we did know for certain that they thought their actions were logical, and that they could explain how logic works to a degree where we can be sure they are making an accurate assessment, how is it then possible to work out what was the internal thought process?

Edit Disclaimer: I realise I may be speaking too absolutely there - in the future, when we are capable of simulating the very sub-atomic structure of a human being right up to the macro level, we will surely be able to figure out what goes into decision making in the human mind, and whether or not it is a logic structure like a computer. Perhaps we will get there before then, but not now - right now, this is all conjecture.