This was a fantastic essay on psychological measurement of personality types. The take-home for me was: The Big Five are, in a sense, protected from fals

This was a fantastic essay on psychological measurement of personality types. The take-home for me was: The Big Five are, in a sense, protected from falsification. They make no predictions; there is no underlying causal model. As I understand it, no study could be devised to prove that the Big Five aren’t real, because they make no formal pretense to reality. They are innocent mathematical constructs that fall out of particular survey instruments administered to particular populations. It is a data point in the idea that 1. only things that could conceivably be measured are real (unmeasurable/unobservable things are magic / not real) 2. but not all measurable (=real) things are important / valuable