Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Ouija in Kiwi is Yeah, Nah

Contemporary society scoffs at the Victorian era quacks, who believed such nonsense as phrenology, the art of determining a person's character by the shape of the head. Today's quackery is much more sophisticated. It's called psychometric testing.

Like the original Ouija board, psychometric tests such as the Myers Brigg Type Indicator might be wholesome entertainment, but I wouldn't like to stake my career on one of them. So it's good to see this black box bigotry is getting challenged, because this HRD voodoo has to stop.

It's culturally biased and loaded with false positive discrimination (maybe the subject likes opera because they're gay, maybe the subject likes being alone because their workmates are discussing X Factor).

It loads recipients with expectations of certain self-censoring behaviours, and then wonders why their workforce is scoffing anti-depressants (At least Freud knew repression was bad).

But worst of all, it creates an underclass borne of superstitious orthodoxies which can't be challenged.