Carl-Richard

Actual correlation coefficients? No idea.

That is so besides the point.

E/I and Extroversion, and N/S and Openness are actually somewhat correlated (0.72 and 0.74). The problems of reliability and validity mostly arise when MBTI says that these things occur in specific dichotomies and combinations, i.e. 16 types.

If you want to be as sure as possible that you'll create human states of mind, the question would be if we could create an artificial cell that could sustain metabolism, homeostasis, and then self-replicate and pass on instructions to its descendants. In a sense, that would be the moment we discover abiogenesis, and we've just created new life. My guess is that such a cell would be more or less identical to a biological one. Natural selection isn't stupid. To then get to human states of mind, you'll just have to make another human.

My point in its simplest form is that taking one human feature (language) and projecting onto it a bunch of other features (sentience) is problematic. I've simply given a detailed account of that. So I would have the same problem with projecting human states of mind onto a hyper-intelligent alien if it somehow fell outside of the domain of biological life (metabolism) or was extremely structurally or behaviorally dissimilar. That said, again, this is only about the parsimony of logical inferences, not about reality as it actually is.

Via. natural selection?

@zurew You can't "test" whether a rock actually has conscious inner life (sentience) either, but you can make good inferences for why it doesn't, which is what I did. That said, why sentience arose at all is a mystery, but again, from what we can observe and infer from those observations, it has to do with biology. More specifically, there is something more to any current widely accepted cases of sentience than pure information processing. I tried to lay out examples: evolutionary drives creating sensory organs, perceptual structures, internal representations, survival-salient experiences (e.g. pleasure and pain, emotions), which then evolves into higher-cognition (meta-consciousness, language, sequential reasoning). Just because you can simulate things like sequential reasoning and complex language in another medium, does not mean that you just retroactively created the infinitely complex evolutionary causal chain that makes up the totality of the human mind and its richness of experiences. Humans don't merely talk or reason: they have emotions, feelings and perceptions that are not reducible to those things. In fact, human language and reasoning is embedded in these lower structures (both evolutionarily and functionally). In other words, these lower forms of sentience come before complex information processing (language and reasoning) ever occurs. Therefore, to say "this machine talks like a human = this machine thinks and feels like a human" is an absurd inference.

The Turing test is neither about consciousness (qualities of experience), sentience (pain or pleasure), or meta-consciousness (reflective self-awareness). By these definitions: consciousness, whether you're an idealist or materialist, either arises outside or inside living organisms, and as an isolated concept, it tells you nothing about complexity of behavior. A dolphin behind a computer doesn't pass the Turing test, but you would be stupid to think it wasn't sentient. Mirror self-recognition tests could indicate a basic form of meta-consciousness, and dolphins definitely display those behaviors, while a computer doesn't, or maybe you could simulate that as well. However, the people who've mentioned the Chinese room experiment and the distinction between a real flower and a plastic flower make an important point: simulations are not the real thing. Simulating one type of behavior from a human does not mean you've created a human. Since you're a human and you experience qualities, pain and pleasure, and reflective self-awareness, it's a safe inference that other things like you (other humans) do as well. Computers are not like you in almost every way. To elaborate on sentience: pain and pleasure is just a specific case of a so-called "conscious inner life"; what Bernardo Kastrup calls a "dissociated alter", or what Donald Hoffman calls "the Dashboard", and it's all linked to living organisms. Living organisms evolved sensory organs and perceptual structures that produce an internal representation of the "outside world" that maximizes evolutionary fitness, and this is linked to positive and negative conscious experiences like pain and pleasure, emotions etc., i.e. experiences which reflect an evolutionary impetus and history. Rocks don't have that, computers don't have that; because these things didn't evolve. It's also true that higher-order mental functions (like meta-consciousness and sequential reasoning) in humans evolved from these lower structures. If you simulate only the higher but not the lower (as with these AI robots), you're missing a huge piece of the cake. Information processing does not make an organism.

It's the leading model in personality theory, so by definition, it isn't. If you had actually read about how the model was made, you would think it was pretty genius (the Lexical hypothesis). I think the Lexical hypothesis is a big reason why the self-assessment tests are so accurate, because the 5 traits were actually found using data from self-assessment tests.

Things start to get a little fuzzy when you start blending spirituality, hermeneutics and dry quantitative science. The fact of the matter is that MBTI presents itself as a rigorously scientific personality model with all the modern chops of quantitative measurements, but it simply isn't that. It's a very specific thing I'm saying. It's true that science often progresses through things like sheer luck or happenstance (like suddenly discovering the therapeutic potential of meditation), things that have really nothing to do with structured methodology, but this still doesn't devalue the very way which we evaluate our current scientific models (which is what the criteria around reliability and validity of measurement instruments in the quantitative social sciences are about). When I say that a model is outdated, it has to have been through the scientific machinery first and then deemed insufficient. That doesn't apply to meditation, as it was just recently discovered by science and then given a warm embrace.

The official MBTI assessment on the Myers and Briggs website (the one you have to pay for, not the quack knock-offs), has among other things poor reliability and validity. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers–Briggs_Type_Indicator#Criticism This is how you do quantitative social science: you take a concept or model, and you create a standardized measurement for it (a.k.a "operationalization"), like a self-assessment test. This is the bottom line of modern personality theory. If you've gone through the effort of creating such a measurement (which MBTI has), and it doesn't hold up, then it's by definition pseudoscience. You bringing up examples that "make logical sense" doesn't change that fact, because again, it's an appeal to postulated explanatory power, not standards of empirical research.

That which is considered pseudoscience today could revolutionize science tomorrow. However, you're not going to do that by simply clinging to an outdated 100 year old model, unless you're able to develop it.

What ? Even under an idealistic ontology, you would still distinguish between sentience and non-sentience. A rock under idealism is made out of consciousness, but it's not sentient (experiencing pain or pleasure), as that requires at least sensory organs, which are survival tools given to animals.

But you're not. You would be lying if you said that.

Yup. Intrinsic motivation is one of the most stable drives of behavior. I guess the challenge is to get somebody to actually change how they think or feel, because I suspect it's not just about one belief. It's a whole system of beliefs that needs to be deconstructed. One belief gets justified by another which gets justified by another etc. It's not a coincidence that veganism is sometimes called a lifestyle or a worldview.

Are you faking it?

Wooo part 2!

Great crossover of non-duality and analytical idealism.

@thisintegrated Here is our disagreement in a nutshell: you're placing value on postulated explanatory power over validity/reliability, while I do the opposite. In other words, MBTI seemingly is able to explain a lot of things (arguably more than Big 5), but when you actually test it through statistical methods, it doesn't add up. Therefore, when I look at it, I see a broken model. When you look at it, you see a broken statistical method. I'm at odds with one model, and you're at odds with the fundamentals of quantitative social science. You don't care about this, because you value the abilities of your own human mind over the statistical methods that are designed to eliminate flaws of the human mind. You also value your own individual abilities over the abilities of a thousand scientific geniuses.

100 years ago, we had horses and MBTI. Today, we have Teslas and Big 5. Yes, science vs. pseudoscience is defined relative to the current scientific paradigm, so it's constantly changing. It's nevertheless a useful distinction, because it tells you how to best explain and predict how nature behaves.

It's a meaningful correlation. It's just not as black-and-white as you prefer it to be. That is the cost of eliminating pseudoscience. I'll continue to call it that because it's an accurate term, not because it's demeaning.

When or if I ever re-open this again, I want you to recognize the excruciating irony of this thread becoming derailed by drama.

After having had to deal with reports from the journaling section for about a year now and having tried repeatedly to find adequate solutions to these problems, I've come to a few conclusions: 1. Moderating personal feuds in the journaling section is nearly impossible to do from an unbiased point of view, both from a technical standpoint and a purely practical standpoint. 1.1 Technical It involves the same people over and over again; long-term and recurring interpersonal feuds with no definite starting point. This is a known phenomena, and there is no simple solution. Communication theory teaches you this. 1.2 Practical It involves scanning through pages upon pages of walls of text in multiple journals, often many hours, days or weeks back in time, and frequently changing between tabs and cross-referencing statements, all while holding two or more conversations in PMs. 2. Moderating, as in giving out warning points, should ideally only be done when there is a definite cause of blame. With complex issues such as these (as stated in 1.1), this is generally not possible. Often, the only valid course of action is manually talking to people, trying to de-escalate tensions, and finally making said people leave each other alone. This is of course ultimately futile when said people like reading other people's journals, and sooner or later, the cycle continues. 3. Personal feuds in the journaling section generally happen in a grey area with respect to the guidelines. These feuds are often fought using covert, subtle and ambiguous language which is not in direct violation of the guidelines. The intended meaning of such language is also hard to decode for a moderator who is not immersed in the same context as the people involved, which goes back to the technical and practical problems in 1.1 and 1.2. Summary and solution: Personal feuds in the journaling section should therefore be regarded as generally not a moderating issue. That said, moderators are still able to take actions against you the way they see fit, the same way they always have (you're not granted some special protection because you were posting in the journaling section). You should only use the report function if there has been a concrete violation of the guidelines, or if you deem it absolutely necessary to do so. It's up to the individuals themselves to decide whether they want to start using the block function, stop reading other people's journals, or leave their emotions aside. Blocking other people keeps you from reading their journals and posts in general, which is the safest option. Please voice your opinions below.

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@Benton @Preety_India Shall I lock this again?