sorry, i'm just getting over inhaling my rice krispies over the 'scientific' evidence that is personality profiling tools.
Well I actually said 'empirical' not scientific, but I appreciate those terms can be interchangeable.
So Swiss01 I guess you’re a PhD in Psychology then are you? Oh no wait, you can’t be because if you were, or if you’d even bothered to read about how profiling tools actually work, you’d know that they are based on highly scientific approaches to generating data. These tools are driven by massive amounts of observed data and highly rigorous statistical analysis.
What you’re (ignorantly) confusing is the difference between what is scientific and what is predictable – perhaps you think that scientific means things have to be 100% predictable. Well I am not a scientist but I’m pretty sure that Heisenberg took care of that Victorian notion of science back in the early part of the last century.
There are issues with personality profiling tools and yes they have a much higher degree of variance in their data than other observable phenomena. We are also light years away from being able to truly understand the connection between personality/hard wired characteristics and behaviour although we can ‘predict’ with often pretty good results, how an individual might behave based on personality profiling as well as other observational data.
The issue with the guy in Cumbria is that this type of behaviour is characteristic of an outlier – they’re so far from the mean as to make it very difficult to predict.
