A personal touchstone that has felt salient as I’ve engaged with glosso over the last few months, is the extent to which some people seem “weird” / “off-distribution”.

There are all kinds of personality typing / psychometrics systems. Ways of clustering people, or decomposing personalities into axes.

I think that there are some people, maybe even most people, who are “well-described” by their scores in these systems. People who sort of generically fall “on the ordinary person-manifold”.

But then some people are not well-described by their scores. You could learn their Enneagram, their MBTI, their Big Five, their IQ, every psychometric score you can name, and you might come away thinking they were a certain way, when in fact they are an outlier who happens to project down to those numbers despite being very far from the manifold. I think I and others in this community are unusually likely to be this kind of outlier for a given system.

As a potential downstream effect of this, I notice that I get wildly different Big Five scores depending on my mindset / interpretation while answering. I get consistently very high openness and low extroversion, but my conscientiousness and agreeableness can each be as low as 10th percentile or as high as 90th. Neuroticism is more consistently high (and glosso’s friend-rating system thought I was 93rd percentile for the site!), but e.g. I just took the Open Psychometrics test, trying to answer honestly, and got 48th percentile.

I think this kind of weirdness is an important thing to be tracking about yourself insofar as it’s true, because it probably means that you will unusually-much have to “figure it out for yourself”. If various psychological interventions are tuned / selected based on their application to the population at large, they’re unusually likely to fail for people who don’t live on that manifold.