There is an important class of claims detailed enough to either be largely accurate or intentional lies, their distortion can’t be achieved with mere lack of understanding or motivated cognition. These can be found even in very strange places, and still be informative when taken out of context.
The claim I see here is that orthonormal used a test for dicey character with reasonable precision. The described collateral damage of just one positive reading signals that it doesn’t trigger all the time, and there was at least one solid true positive. The wording also vaguely suggests that there aren’t too many other positive readings, in which case the precision is even higher than the collateral damage signals.
Since base rate is lower than the implied precision, a positive reading works as evidence. For the opposite claim, that someone has an OK character, evidence of this form can’t have similar strength, since the base rate is already high and there is no room for precision to get significantly higher.
It’s still not strong evidence, and directly it’s only about character in the sense of low-level intuitive and emotional inclinations. This is in turn only weak evidence of actual behavior, since people often live their lives “out of character”, it’s the deliberative reasoning that matters for who someone actually is as a person. Internal urges are only a risk factor and a psychological inconvenience for someone who disagrees with their own urges and can’t or won’t retrain them, it’s not an important defining characteristic and not relevant in most contexts. This must even be purposefully disregarded in some contexts to prevent discrimination.
Edit: I managed to fumble terminology in the original version of this comment and said “specificity” instead of “precision” or “positive predictive value”, which is what I actually meant. It’s true that specificity of the test is also not low (much higher even), and for basically the same reasons, but high specificity doesn’t make a positive reading positive evidence.
There is an important class of claims detailed enough to either be largely accurate or intentional lies, their distortion can’t be achieved with mere lack of understanding or motivated cognition. These can be found even in very strange places, and still be informative when taken out of context.
The claim I see here is that orthonormal used a test for dicey character with reasonable precision. The described collateral damage of just one positive reading signals that it doesn’t trigger all the time, and there was at least one solid true positive. The wording also vaguely suggests that there aren’t too many other positive readings, in which case the precision is even higher than the collateral damage signals.
Since base rate is lower than the implied precision, a positive reading works as evidence. For the opposite claim, that someone has an OK character, evidence of this form can’t have similar strength, since the base rate is already high and there is no room for precision to get significantly higher.
It’s still not strong evidence, and directly it’s only about character in the sense of low-level intuitive and emotional inclinations. This is in turn only weak evidence of actual behavior, since people often live their lives “out of character”, it’s the deliberative reasoning that matters for who someone actually is as a person. Internal urges are only a risk factor and a psychological inconvenience for someone who disagrees with their own urges and can’t or won’t retrain them, it’s not an important defining characteristic and not relevant in most contexts. This must even be purposefully disregarded in some contexts to prevent discrimination.
Edit: I managed to fumble terminology in the original version of this comment and said “specificity” instead of “precision” or “positive predictive value”, which is what I actually meant. It’s true that specificity of the test is also not low (much higher even), and for basically the same reasons, but high specificity doesn’t make a positive reading positive evidence.