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Twice I have been through interviews that use hours of psychology assessments to filter candidates. One of those was a large hedge fund. Through that I have l

Twice I have been through interviews that use hours of psychology assessments to filter candidates. One of those was a large hedge fund. Through that I have learned that objectivity is a measurable and identifable personality trait that is astonishingly rare. Most humans are hardwired to seek mutual security, which means banding together as a stress coping mechanism. That incidentally means some natural revulsion of originality, objectivity, individuality, and even honesty. More important are group conformance, mutual reassurance, and perceptions of social security. This is readily observable when you take a group of people who have never worked together and are generally unfamiliar with the outdoors and drop them into an outdoor military training exercise, such as college ROTC junior classmen. Naturally they congregate really closely together and wait for somebody to tell them what to do with minimal or no initiative, all of which is a bad idea in modern military training.

anonuser123456 7y ago
>Through that I have learned that objectivity is a measurable and identifable personality trait that is astonishingly rare. How does one test for this? I would like to mark my own belief to market.
- hnuser123456 7y ago
  It's easiest to tell when someone is in a mildly stressful situation, and to see if they can focus on the task and evaluate tactical options to move forward, or if they get defensive. Also, hello username buddy.
  - texasbigdata 7y ago
    Defensiveness or stress tolerance or problem solving are not objectivity
    - hnuser123456 7y ago
      >A human being’s very sense of self is intimately tied up with his or her identity group’s status and beliefs. Unsurprisingly, then, people respond automatically and defensively to information that threatens their ideological worldview. We respond with rationalization and selective assessment of evidence — that is, we engage in confirmation bias, giving credit to expert testimony we like and find reasons to reject the rest. >Political scientists Charles Taber and Milton Lodge experimentally confirmed the existence of this automatic response. They found that partisan subjects, when presented with photos of politicians, produce an affective “like/dislike” response that precedes any sort of conscious, factual assessment as to who is pictured. >In ideologically charged situations, one’s prejudices end up affecting one’s factual beliefs. Insofar as you define yourself in terms of your cultural affiliations, information that threatens your belief system — say, information about the negative effects of industrial production on the environment — can threaten your sense of identity itself. If it’s part of your ideological community’s worldview that unnatural things are unhealthful, factual information about a scientific consensus on the safety of vaccines or GMOs feels like a personal attack. If you are objective, you are not threatened by surprising new information, even if it might have some negative implications that jump to mind. You evaluate it against every other relevant information source you have on the topic, sometimes requiring more complex chains of information, and assign a level of trust to the new info.
- austincheney 7y ago
  Here is what it was like in these cases I interviewed. Both provided several, maybe 6, online assessments of intellectual and emotional health. Think of these like IQ tests, but they are divergent tests instead of convergent tests. That means they are testing for things like vocabulary and creativity instead of multiple choice with a prior identified accepted answer. After testing at the hedge fund I was able to see my scores and assessments. The other place is an elite military group, and I was not allowed to see my scores unless I accepted the job. The military group followed the on screen tests by a one on one with a psychologist. I passed both assessments but chose to not accept either job due to unrelated conditions like a competing job offer, bad timing, life conditions.
  - Terretta 7y ago
    Still interested in boosting personal effectiveness with teammates who apply some of those ideas? Email in profile. PS. You don’t really binary pass/fail the assessments. They tend to inform whether and how you and others can complement or guardrail each other on mission as a team.
tabtab 7y ago
Re: I have learned that objectivity...is astonishingly rare. As somebody who has been in many political debates, I have to agree. A good many are addicted to authority figures to tell them how to think. Another frustrating aspect of human nature is that most people don't know how to be logical. I strive to be logical as a personal goal, but it's often not valued in the work-place, or anywhere. Keep in mind "logical" is not necessarily the same as "being right", at least not my working definition. Being logical is being able to back up your viewpoint and claims using a clear chain of logic. I define any assumptions I make as givens, and my conclusion can be formed directly from those givens. I don't necessarily write it out in formal logic, but if one questions a specific informally-written step, I can and do formalize/clarify it. Most don't return the favor. "My guts have proven accurate and I'd rather trust my gut feelings" is a common response. Screw Guts, I want logic, damn humans! Human guts have proven dumb.
- padmanabhan01 7y ago
  It's not always logic vs guts. Logic is great when you are dealing with theoretical problems that are well defined and you know the variables involved etc. In real life problems, often there are way too many variables, are time bound, things aren't as well defined. It's in those cases that people resort to gut..
  - adventured 7y ago
    I've found the lack of an ability to use basic logic to be extremely widespread down to simple conversational matters. It severely impedes and distracts conversations (online and off). I wish it were primarily a problem when dealing with theoreticals, as I find it's a problem just about any time you converse where there are many people. Emotionalism is rampant. I have yet to find a forum - in ~25 years of near daily discussions on forums online - where incredibly obvious logic failures don't happen persistently. And I'm only talking about the basics, nothing complex. The worst and most common, I believe, is: because you said X, therefore you must believe / endorse / be implying Y. It's some kind of emotional transitive property of logic failure. Example concepts: I say: Bush did X. Response: Yeah but Obama did a thing, he's worse, how can you support him?!? (Obama isn't part of the conversation at all, there was no statement endorsing Obama whatsoever) I say: the US did X. Response: Yeah but Russia (or China etc) is evil and did a thing, they're even worse because of a thing! (the other countries aren't part of the conversation at all, I never suggested the other countries are good or bad or did or didn't do a thing). I say: I'm in favor of an immigration system like Canada or Australia. Response: how can you support internment camps and murdering children at the border? Or more calmly: why are you against immigration? (there was no mention of being against immigration at all, Canada allows plenty of immigration via their approach) Some of it is obviously an emotional attempt at diversion, an irrational reflex to change the conversation away from what it's pointing at for one reason or another. Logic is in part about self-control and my observation is that it's a rare quality. I've yet to find a forum where this doesn't happen constantly, basically in every large thread. You spend half your effort on forums either trying to pre-empt very primitive logic failure responses via how you structure what you write so you don't have to waste your time later correcting people, or you have to waste time responding after the fact and noting that no, in fact you didn't endorse x y z.
internet_user 7y ago
how is that measured? what are the tests that measure for it? tia
joe_the_user 7y ago
This is readily observable when you take a group of people who have never worked together and are generally unfamiliar with the outdoors and drop them into an outdoor military training exercise, such as college ROTC junior classmen. Thinking about it, the only way that this course of action is "not logical" is that it is not "deciding on a course of action and following it regardless of the approach of one's fellows", maybe that it's not oriented to looking the terrain instead of following emotions. But all these more like skills or "personality makeup" and as such, they aren't even applicable to every situation. If you're starting a situation where individual would be bonding over a long period, congregating with one's fellows may be a good or "objective" strategy.
- austincheney 7y ago
  In a tactical environment the problem with clustering is that modern weapons will quickly take out everybody. There needs to be some space between people, maybe a couple meters. The problem with a lack of initiative is that it undermines security. If you don’t know what you should be doing then at least you can secure part of the group’s perimeter by seeking cover and looking outward until told otherwise.
  - joe_the_user 7y ago
    Sure, but I don't think you're talking about "logic" as such. It is more a matter of thinking about the conditions of the environment. IE, you're talking of specific skills and understanding as if they were a general thing, "logic". Not that I'd disagree with comment about what should be done.
gen_greyface 7y ago
for what jobs were you interviewing?

anonuser123456 7y ago

>Through that I have learned that objectivity is a measurable and identifable personality trait that is astonishingly rare. How does one test for this? I would like to mark my own belief to market.

hnuser123456 7y ago
It's easiest to tell when someone is in a mildly stressful situation, and to see if they can focus on the task and evaluate tactical options to move forward, or if they get defensive. Also, hello username buddy.
- texasbigdata 7y ago
  Defensiveness or stress tolerance or problem solving are not objectivity
  - hnuser123456 7y ago
    >A human being’s very sense of self is intimately tied up with his or her identity group’s status and beliefs. Unsurprisingly, then, people respond automatically and defensively to information that threatens their ideological worldview. We respond with rationalization and selective assessment of evidence — that is, we engage in confirmation bias, giving credit to expert testimony we like and find reasons to reject the rest. >Political scientists Charles Taber and Milton Lodge experimentally confirmed the existence of this automatic response. They found that partisan subjects, when presented with photos of politicians, produce an affective “like/dislike” response that precedes any sort of conscious, factual assessment as to who is pictured. >In ideologically charged situations, one’s prejudices end up affecting one’s factual beliefs. Insofar as you define yourself in terms of your cultural affiliations, information that threatens your belief system — say, information about the negative effects of industrial production on the environment — can threaten your sense of identity itself. If it’s part of your ideological community’s worldview that unnatural things are unhealthful, factual information about a scientific consensus on the safety of vaccines or GMOs feels like a personal attack. If you are objective, you are not threatened by surprising new information, even if it might have some negative implications that jump to mind. You evaluate it against every other relevant information source you have on the topic, sometimes requiring more complex chains of information, and assign a level of trust to the new info.
austincheney 7y ago
Here is what it was like in these cases I interviewed. Both provided several, maybe 6, online assessments of intellectual and emotional health. Think of these like IQ tests, but they are divergent tests instead of convergent tests. That means they are testing for things like vocabulary and creativity instead of multiple choice with a prior identified accepted answer. After testing at the hedge fund I was able to see my scores and assessments. The other place is an elite military group, and I was not allowed to see my scores unless I accepted the job. The military group followed the on screen tests by a one on one with a psychologist. I passed both assessments but chose to not accept either job due to unrelated conditions like a competing job offer, bad timing, life conditions.
- Terretta 7y ago
  Still interested in boosting personal effectiveness with teammates who apply some of those ideas? Email in profile. PS. You don’t really binary pass/fail the assessments. They tend to inform whether and how you and others can complement or guardrail each other on mission as a team.

tabtab 7y ago

Re: I have learned that objectivity...is astonishingly rare. As somebody who has been in many political debates, I have to agree. A good many are addicted to authority figures to tell them how to think. Another frustrating aspect of human nature is that most people don't know how to be logical. I strive to be logical as a personal goal, but it's often not valued in the work-place, or anywhere. Keep in mind "logical" is not necessarily the same as "being right", at least not my working definition. Being logical is being able to back up your viewpoint and claims using a clear chain of logic. I define any assumptions I make as givens, and my conclusion can be formed directly from those givens. I don't necessarily write it out in formal logic, but if one questions a specific informally-written step, I can and do formalize/clarify it. Most don't return the favor. "My guts have proven accurate and I'd rather trust my gut feelings" is a common response. Screw Guts, I want logic, damn humans! Human guts have proven dumb.

padmanabhan01 7y ago
It's not always logic vs guts. Logic is great when you are dealing with theoretical problems that are well defined and you know the variables involved etc. In real life problems, often there are way too many variables, are time bound, things aren't as well defined. It's in those cases that people resort to gut..
- adventured 7y ago
  I've found the lack of an ability to use basic logic to be extremely widespread down to simple conversational matters. It severely impedes and distracts conversations (online and off). I wish it were primarily a problem when dealing with theoreticals, as I find it's a problem just about any time you converse where there are many people. Emotionalism is rampant. I have yet to find a forum - in ~25 years of near daily discussions on forums online - where incredibly obvious logic failures don't happen persistently. And I'm only talking about the basics, nothing complex. The worst and most common, I believe, is: because you said X, therefore you must believe / endorse / be implying Y. It's some kind of emotional transitive property of logic failure. Example concepts: I say: Bush did X. Response: Yeah but Obama did a thing, he's worse, how can you support him?!? (Obama isn't part of the conversation at all, there was no statement endorsing Obama whatsoever) I say: the US did X. Response: Yeah but Russia (or China etc) is evil and did a thing, they're even worse because of a thing! (the other countries aren't part of the conversation at all, I never suggested the other countries are good or bad or did or didn't do a thing). I say: I'm in favor of an immigration system like Canada or Australia. Response: how can you support internment camps and murdering children at the border? Or more calmly: why are you against immigration? (there was no mention of being against immigration at all, Canada allows plenty of immigration via their approach) Some of it is obviously an emotional attempt at diversion, an irrational reflex to change the conversation away from what it's pointing at for one reason or another. Logic is in part about self-control and my observation is that it's a rare quality. I've yet to find a forum where this doesn't happen constantly, basically in every large thread. You spend half your effort on forums either trying to pre-empt very primitive logic failure responses via how you structure what you write so you don't have to waste your time later correcting people, or you have to waste time responding after the fact and noting that no, in fact you didn't endorse x y z.

internet_user 7y ago

how is that measured? what are the tests that measure for it? tia

joe_the_user 7y ago

This is readily observable when you take a group of people who have never worked together and are generally unfamiliar with the outdoors and drop them into an outdoor military training exercise, such as college ROTC junior classmen. Thinking about it, the only way that this course of action is "not logical" is that it is not "deciding on a course of action and following it regardless of the approach of one's fellows", maybe that it's not oriented to looking the terrain instead of following emotions. But all these more like skills or "personality makeup" and as such, they aren't even applicable to every situation. If you're starting a situation where individual would be bonding over a long period, congregating with one's fellows may be a good or "objective" strategy.

austincheney 7y ago
In a tactical environment the problem with clustering is that modern weapons will quickly take out everybody. There needs to be some space between people, maybe a couple meters. The problem with a lack of initiative is that it undermines security. If you don’t know what you should be doing then at least you can secure part of the group’s perimeter by seeking cover and looking outward until told otherwise.
- joe_the_user 7y ago
  Sure, but I don't think you're talking about "logic" as such. It is more a matter of thinking about the conditions of the environment. IE, you're talking of specific skills and understanding as if they were a general thing, "logic". Not that I'd disagree with comment about what should be done.

gen_greyface 7y ago

for what jobs were you interviewing?