Sure, it’s not rigorously sound in a neuroscience way, but then again neither are many psychometric tests.
Part of the trouble of MB is that it insists on discrete categories, but any test like this is going to have some problems. For instance, if all you got back from an IQ test was “genius” or “normal”, then someone on the threshold would flicker between the two on retests. For MB, this is only a problem if you take the categories as being literally true which almost no one does any more (if ever). MB’s retest consistency is actually pretty high, given what it purports to do.
It’s worth, imho, comparing MB to, say, the google ad placement algorithm. They each statistically use some input to make a discrete decision. For MB you get one of 2^4 categories, and for google, you get a few ads chosen out of a kajillion candidates. Neither one is scientific, but that’s a far cry from “basically meaningless”. Google adwords makes bank despite being sorta crap. Analogously, would you claim that knowing someone’s most recent MB-test type is meaningless? No. It’s not real science, but it’s far from completely uninformative.
I could go on and on, but I think most of the issue here is that people disagree on what should be measured, and when these measurements should be used. The test does at least a mediocre job at a very difficult problem.
Oh, it’s worth adding that you should consider the alternative when evaluating psychometric tests for institutional use. These tests are not replacing some enlightened, wise arbiter who considers your abilities and disposition objectively and weighs them against their employer’s goals. On the contrary, the alternative is sometimes a biased-as-all-hell flawed human being with at most a checklist of shallow certifications. Then again, the psychometric test is often just another item on the checklist, but it’s not at all clear that MB (or whatever else) makes things worse, whatever its shortcomings may be.
I’m afraid all you bastards happy mutants have just spoiled one of my favorite movies for me. In 30+ years it’s never occurred to me that replicants could be tagged for easy ID.
I’m going to play the Blu-Ray 25th Anniversary Absolutely Positively Final Cut version and spend the afternoon huddled in a dark room with fatty, salty snacks pouting. That’l teach you!
That can be said about a lot of psychometric tests – from Inkblots to Myers-Briggs back in the day when Psychology was still feeling its way around, yet by judging by all those Buzzfeed/Blogthings and their million permutations of personality quizzes – no one really cares – they just want the results to tell them how superfabulous they are…
I thought that the company had basically set itself the challenge of creating a perfect replicant. They wanted to be the ones to create strong AI, an artificial creature indistinguishable from a human. Even if this causes problems for law enforcement.
There may be research to be gained on replicants who do not know they are replicants, and how they interact with humanity. Rachel certainly didn’t know and would probably have been very shocked in two-three years to suddenly drop dead.
no. this would actually work (in the fictional universe), and it wouldn’t need to be any more intrusive than a blood test which law enforcement already uses.
