Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Oh, my God, nonsense, utter nonsense. It is not that these factors don’t exist, it’s just that the constellations of these factors don’t tell you who you are. Your personality is mutable. It changes moment to moment, nevermind under stress versus not. Anybody listening to this, you are not a bloody primary color. The complexity of the human condition cannot be captured in red. It’s not who we are. I love taking those Jedi tests, quizzes. What kind of Jedi are you? And I managed to contrive it so I’m always my favorite Jedi. And that’s what personality tests are. Hogan and the rest of them contrive. And all they do is gatekeep, because you end up with people who read these things and think, “Oh, extroversion is important. If you’re not an extrovert, how will you speak in front of people? How are you speak in front of shareholders?” That’s nonsense. I’m an extreme introvert. I find human beings extraordinarily energy-expensive, but worth it. And personality tests have been holding down the same groups of people for the last 50 years. We need to bin them and throw them out. I think introverts, on average, are better speakers than extroverts. They get less nervous. Again, my mind immediately went, citation, please. I don’t know if that’s true, but I’m an introvert, so it appeals to me. But I definitely think that if you’re an introvert, speaking is so energy-expensive, that if you’re going to do it, speaking especially in front of an audience or in front of somebody consequential is so energy-expensive, if you’re going to do it, you tend to plan and think it through more carefully, which can mean that your words are more carefully chosen, more carefully tonally placed. Whereas if you’re an extrovert, you just like to talk, and so you might just say anything. I don’t know, I haven’t seen the evidence behind that, but it appeals to me.…

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