Personality and Popularity in the Speakeasy (A Study!)

[Mina]

Wow, Psyche, this is an incredible amount of work. Thank you for putting all that thought and effort into your analysis. This was far more than I was expecting. TBH, I'm a bit sceptical of the IBM test; there are probably some markers in individuals' posting styles or in the threads that they usually participate in that trip up the algorithm--for example, there's probably something causing Drench to rank near the top in so many traits and N to rank at the bottom (maybe N's Normal queue posts that consist of lists of made-up words confuse the program). But like you said, overall averages, and that graph of distinctiveness vs. popularity is really compelling.

While looking at the results, I thought of a hypothesis that might be completely wrong because I'm not very statistically literate, so I apologize in advance if the actual scientists laugh at me for this. Couldn't the correlation between distinctiveness and popularity be partially caused by certain traits having such a skewed average on MS that outliers are

representative

rather than distinctive? For example, if the site average in a trait like Depression is 0.9, then someone who has a score of 0.5 would be "distinctive" even if that person is typical for the general population. Likewise, someone with an artsiness of 0.5 would appear unusually artsy compared to an average of 0.1.

The pattern that jumped out at me from the completely unscientific process of skimming results for my scores was that the distinctiveness vs. popularity correlation is strongest for traits like depression/artsiness that seem.to have lopsided MS averages rather than those hovering around 0.4-0.6. So if the average score for every trait is 0.5, it's possible that we're actually biased towards representative people...only these people are representative of the entire world rather than the subset of the world that posts on mafiascum.net.

Could you plot popularity vs. the distinctiveness of a trait relative to the general population rather than to MS's community? (E.g., find the difference of a user's trait from 0.5 instead of from the MS average.) I'm curious to see how the two graphs compare.

[Mina]

I don't know that I think the popularity to personality scores is going to become very valuable until you get a wider range of popularity, including those at the bottom.

Psyche ranked all 146 people in SUPP--he's just only releasing the individual profiles of the people who requested them.

[Mina]

I HAVE THE HIGHEST INTELLECT!!

Sorry to break this to you, but you actually have the

lowest

intellect of the people who requested profiles. The 121 means that you came in 121^nd out of the 146 people in the popularity contest.

*pat pat*

[Mina]

I'd just assumed IBM doesn't actually save the inputted text in the backend. Does the site have a privacy policy?

[Mina]

Something we're discussing in the site chat: did your scraper remove quotes from people's posts?