About a year ago I took one of those aptitude tests. The test was what all standardized tests are — inaccurate and easily manipulable. One thing I took away, however, was the hypothesis the interpreter of my results had about what I perceived as a strong organizational ability (yes, sometimes bordering with OCD). Perhaps — the person suggested — my ability to keep track of many things at once, never forget what needs to be done and when, and organize things into related categories are all a coping mechanism that I built for myself to compensate for being naturally disorganized. While it’s a long shot, there is some evidence for it — I need to write things down as my scratchpad memory is weak and I have spent a long time perfecting a mechanism for staying organized. But the idea of having a trait be a disguise for a natural lack thereof struck me as interesting.

An aside (while we’re at “faking” things) that I alluded to above: I think a test is either accurate, or can be streamlined, but never both. The latter requires some level of systemization and trivialization, and thus the possibility that smart people will be able to fake the results by reverse engineering the test. The MBTI is a perfect example of that: the algorithm for delivering the MBTI metric is very deterministic which makes the test easily administrable but because of that, it’s pretty obvious what choice will yield a particular MBTI type.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 29th, 2010 at 18:22 and is filed under for reflection, human nature, reductions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.