One Million Characters

I was unnerved but not surprised at how accurately the service predicted my personality.

Out of curiousity I went to have a look at this, and they also will analyse from any text you have written and not just tweets, so I put in a bunch of my longer posts from here and let it do an analysis.

 

Personally, I think the results it predicts are like horoscopes - generic things that people then read in to, to see something that matches themselves.

I am a saxophonist and composer, and the demo predicted that I play music. That is a fairly specific thing to infer from a text that does not mention music at all.

My personality breakdown was a near-perfect match with the results of a Big 5 psychometric test I took a year ago. And my breakdown did not change much when I fed different texts, on different subjects, into the demo. Horoscopes do not work like that.

4 hours ago, murrayjames said:

My personality breakdown was a near-perfect match with the results of a Big 5 psychometric test I took a year ago

And mine was almost the complete opposite!

 

4 hours ago, murrayjames said:

And my breakdown did not change much when I fed different texts, on different subjects, into the demo

Now try putting someone elses texts in to the demo, and see how sentences in the description of your personality that you can still relate to.  If you still find things that are 'right', well, that is how Horoscopes work.

20 hours ago, imron said:

And mine was almost the complete opposite!

 

Hmm... interesting. I do see what you mean by horoscope sentences. One sentence that came up with someone else’s text—“You are motivated to seek out experiences that provide a strong feeling of belongingness”—is vague enough that people with very different personalities could relate to it.

 

The demo works for me, however. I put some texts written by other people into the demo. Many of the resulting sentences did not describe my personality accurately, though some did. The personality results using these texts were less relatable than the personality results using my own texts.

 

Also, when using my own texts, the demo spits out very similar Big 5 breakdowns, notwithstanding significant differences between the texts. So the demo is clearly tracking something in the way I write. Otherwise there would be more variation in these breakdowns, like there is when I use other people’s texts.

People definitely do have detectable writing styles (see the field of stylometry) so it's not a surprise that it can spit out similar breakdowns based on text written by the same person.

 

And I'm sure it does track something, my point of contention is how much that something has to do with your personality, and how much is it used to just choose out of several 'vague, but could be talking about me' sentences.

 

 

Yes, obviously people have writing styles. My point is that the demo is tracking something about the way I write AND what it infers from that something matches both the results of a Big 5 psychometry test and how I understand my own personality. When I tried using other people’s texts, many of the sentences were not “vague, but could be talking about me.” They did not describe my personality well at all.

Ok.  We had different experiences with this.

Wonder how this would work with a collection of Trump's Tweets.