If you think data are a basis for choosing the right system, think hard about whether you really should be measuring a spectrum labeled “introversion to extraversion” with p-values and things, and whether better numbers mean you understand the referents of the words better.
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Note that this problem exists even in astronomy/astrology. It took a while for people to figure out that “morning star” and “evening star” both point to the planet Venus. Making words mean things in clear ways before measurements make any sort of sense is non-trivial work.
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What’s the point of very precise morning/evening star position logs if you’re trying to compute 2 paths for 1 object in a geocentric system of spheres? Your ontology has an extra fictitious thing in it, and your scaffolding is highly suboptimal at least, and arguably wrong.
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A trickier example: ancient Indian astronomy/astrology explained eclipses in terms of 2 demon “shadow planets” named Rahu and Ketu. It’s not clear what those proper nouns refer to. It’s not their demonic personification that’s the problem. It’s their ontological ambiguity.
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Similarly alchemy era had its phlogiston, pre-relativistic physics had ether and elan vital, modern physics has dark matter. The presence of dubious elements is not the problem. It’s pretending they’re NOT dubious.
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Or worse acting like empirical noise can make meaningless concepts meaningful. Ambiguity cannot be resolved by increasing empirical certainty. Higher resolution image won’t resolve the duck-rabbit illusion into clearly a duck or rabbit.
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Philosophically rigorous fields progressively clean up ontology.
Philosophically sloppy and/or dishonest fields pretend increasing certainty about ambiguous things creates better truth.
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So why do I like Myers-Briggs better? Because given that what *can* be measured is nebulous-dubious-ambiguous, it’s actually useful to explore foundations conceptually rather than empirically. To go beyond using sketchy surveys to point to weasel words that point to some “traits”
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There’s an entire “geocentric” theory of personality under the hood. Not just words pointing at each other and statistics. It’s at least *trying* to be about the world. It’s wrong in the right way. It has the right kind of history going back to Freud and Jung.
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I mean a tradition of interest in the actual object of interest (the brain in this case) open to anyone to join/study and join the tradition of, as opposed to priests of some institutions interested in something else, like retaining power
