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Wellness Wednesday for September 13, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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An opportunity to be a datapoint? Let me at it!

Extraversion - 29th p.

Emotional Stability - 81st p.

Agreeableness - 40th p.

Conscientiousness - 18th p.

Intellect/Imagination - 80th p.

It pretty much comports exactly with how I understand myself and so isn't offering me any fresh or striking insights, unfortunately, but what can I really expect from a 50-question personality test?

(I do think 'Openness to Experience' is a better label for their Factor V though - I don't know that I would consider myself in the 80th percentile of 'intellect', or if I were to, it wouldn't be based on anything this test asked me.)

That makes me curious though, has anybody here ever gotten a result from a test like this that's very surprising or counterintuitive, in a way that offered you some grain of insight or cause for reflection?

edit: Oh cool, several responders here did get such a result. Interesting!

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I got 19, 62, 0, 67, 33 respectively. The 0 in agreeableness is highly unlikely to be correct, but I may be misinterpreting what it purports to represent. I do tend to disagree with a lot of people, but I am certainly polite and hate confrontation.

It pretty much comports exactly with how I understand myself and so isn't offering me any fresh or striking insights, unfortunately, but what can I really expect from a 50-question personality test?

What Big 5 has going for it is largely that it's psychometrically validated with plenty of features we care about in real life, and reproducibly so. I don't expect anyone who has any combination of intelligence and introspection to be amazed at its findings, but it is a decent enough way of comparing between people.