I want to collect some data on the sort of people who follow me on Substack. Once I have enough responses I will edit this post and provide some interesting analytics.
Please take this personality test and type your results in the comments section below:
https://www.truity.com/test/big-five-personality-test
If you are curious, my own results are as follows:
***EDIT 5/10***
I have processed the first day’s worth of analytics across fifty unique data points:
As predicted, average openness was through the roof, with a narrow spread and only a single major outlier (of 44). All other dimensions show an average close to 50 with a large standard deviation, indicating that in these areas my followers aren’t meaningfully different from normal people.
And that makes sense—the Walt Right draws from a very wide swath of people with incredibly distinct backgrounds, temperaments, and sensibilities. What ties us together? Incredibly high openness. I’ve come to realize that such openness is what I value more than anything else as a political principle, and should be seen as the fundamental bedrock of the Walt Right.
Openness: 87.5
Conscientiousness: 56
Extraversion: 46
Agreeableness: 62.5
Neuroticism: 65
These Likert scale self-reports are fraught with difficulties in individual assessment styles and self-aggrandizement / disparagement. There are people who will conclude that 99% agreement with something is still just a "mild agree" because the mythical max value can never be attained, while others will swing entirely for max values on even the slightest whims of the day's mood. I also trust less the assessments that give as a result flattering assessments of, "who you are" as a result of those scores - it makes it harder to be objective about whether it is true about you or not. Better when they say things like, "You're often scattered and stuck in daydreams," or "You tend to be prone to unnecessary arguments," which one's ego is not going to claim on the basis of flattery alone.
A more objective kind of testing that tests for actual expressed behaviors and approaches is better, albeit not as easy. Originally the Ink Blot Test was surprisingly useful because certain psychological conditions would predispose a person to parse the "image" in different ways. Whereas a normal mind might look at the outlines to form the "base" image in one, a divergent mind would use the colors as the base image. It actually didn't matter "what" they saw, but "how" they came to see it. Unfortunately when adopted by Hollywood and the popular conception, they turned it into a matter like astrology or dream interpretation seeing a butterfly versus a skull meant something for what butterflies represent as opposed to skulls, and those meanings are more nuanced and messy and prone to subjective interpretation than whether your brain is parsing by color or outline or negative space predominantly.
Anyway, I don't put much stock into self-assessments, but in aggregate it might show hints at a general tendency.
So basically it looks like all the higher neuroticism people are INTJs and the few of us low neuroticism people are INTPs. That's why we can talk to you right-wingers without getting upset. :) I got:
O: 89
C: 43
E: 47
A: 41
N: 8
I think descriptors are more fun, so I'll just give the names I've been called by people, which I think validate the results:
- A robot
- A cyborg
- A Soviet spy
- A gay man in a woman's body (this didn't used to have the implications it does nowadays)
- Larry David if he was a hot chick
- An ice queen
- An alien
- Karmic Retribution Woman
- A hedonic flesh computer
- A Valkyrie with a brain transplant from an old Jewish man
- Way less of a bitch than I thought you were