Let’s make this short and sweet.
There are three kinds of preference:
Stated Preference (SP): a person’s testimony to interlocutors or surveyors about his internal conative state (think intentions, desires, and normative judgments)
Believed Preference (BP): a person’s ackshual internal conative state to the extent he’s consciously aware of it—i.e. what he THINKS he wants, intends, or believes
Revealed Preference (RP): what a person ackshully wants in practice, ascertained by looking at the operative invariants behind his real-world choices ceteris paribus
There are therefore two different ways in which preference gets misstated:
Preference Falsification, wherein someone knowingly misrepresents their opinion or desire or intention (usually for fear of reprisal or in pursuit of social advantage), which can be represented as the delta between SP and BP—think shy Trump or Brexit voters, or telling your girlfriend she doesn’t look fat in that dress.
Preference Confabulation, wherein someone unconsciously transmogrifies a mostly precognitive somatic judgment into a moralized or aestheticized judgement that misplaces the causal mechanism, typically to maintain the integrity of one’s own self-concept. This can be represented as the delta between BP and RP—think registering the comment of someone with an asymmetrical face as rude whilst registering precisely the same comment from someone you’d like to have sex with as endearingly cheeky. There wouldn’t be confabulation present if the proposition were “this fellow is annoying because his face is asymmetrical,” but once you project the causal mechanism onto his behavior then it becomes confabulation.
Now obviously it’s very possible for an utterance to contain both falsification and confabulation. When a man spuriously informs a girl he’s trying to seduce that he’s sure to get promoted in six months and the same girl slices her bodycount in half it usually involves both a bit of overt lying justified to oneself as part of the game and a bit of internally sincere mythopoesis and magical thinking, with the border between the two being fuzzy by design. Meanwhile anyone who’s interviewed for a job they’re not entirely qualified for knows that at times confabulation gets you from A to B and falsification from B to C with the operations being quite starkly divided in one’s mind.
With preference representation in particular you tend to get a lot of cross-pollination between the two, as preferences are inherently unstable, only partially accessible to the conscious mind, and seldom arise in a vacuum, instead remaining subject to constant endogenous repricing around peer pressure, arbitrage opportunities, etc.
Alas, this framework is uncongenial to an ideology pervasive in Anglo-American academia and legacy media that I call Discursive Whiggishness, which descends from the Protestant obsession with “free will” and “belief” and affords excessive solemnity to both the truth-aptness of an actor’s purported conative state (which in reality is a frothing inchoate stew of contrary impulses and strictures) and to the presumptive honesty of an actor’s testimony to that effect, with the ontological border between truth and falsehood being a lot thicker than you find in, say, Irish / French / Russian culture, where there’s a lot more room for mythopoesis and interpretive give-and-take and you don’t always need to come up with autistic concepts like the “white lie.”
The discursive conventions of analytic philosophy are built on that tradition, and if you try to challenge them or put forward any muscular account of genealogy or the epistemic implications of status-coding they’ll generally call you a postmodernist.
Which isn’t to say the continentals are automatically any better; they certainly grok the epistemics of status and power, but also have a tendency to let that devour thought itself. At least, though, they aren’t naive realists on the question of whether thick precognitivism makes all of philosophy a retarded waste of time, which IMO Nietzsche and Wittgenstein came the closest to solving in radically different ways, commencing a project I myself attempted to finish in The Orange Book.
But that’s beside the point—I’m here to broadside survey data!
Below I’ll lay out my argument in a hopefully digestible form.
First ask yourself: when someone takes a survey, what exactly are they doing?
Clearly they aren’t some neutral Archimedean tribunal with perfect access to their own mind and a purely disinterested telos of maximizing the fidelity of survey data.
Most of the time they’re either a) wanting to define and individuate themselves; or b) participating out of politeness or in instrumental pursuit of some practical incentive, whether that’s money, the establishment of an institutionally ratified result, or a feeling of community within the microculture administering the poll.
Thus we encounter a number of distortion incentives:
On tests like a Hogwarts Sorting Hat Quiz, Which Sopranos Character Are You?, Myers-Briggs, and the Big 5 it’s easy for a participant to answer based mostly on their idealized self-concept—which to be fair is a pretty good proxy in most cases, as the average person who simply values e.g. openness or conscientiousness is disproportionately likely to enter into various feedback loops that reinforce the ackshual underlying trait. But it remains a potential epistemic hazard.
On surveys that have obvious political implications—think one asking black undergrads if stereotype threat has ever made it difficult for them to achieve academically—you have an incentive for participants to distort their responses that can easily reside in an innocent confabulatory space because for their entire life they’ve been primed by adults to participate in a self-flattering narrative.
On surveys that have asymmetric prestige valence—think bodycount—you have e.g. men counting girls they only got to second base with and women discounting that dude who only got it halfway in because he was too drunk, with the operative confabulatory rules in both directions existing nowhere in the question itself.
On surveys within an affectively thick microculture led by a charismatic and hyperverbal influencer type—think Aella or CHH polling their subscribers—you get both a falsification incentive insofar as participants want to be part of the supercool community and a confabulation incentive insofar as they’ll begin to define their own self-concept endogenously within its peer pressure ecosystem. Hell, I myself almost certainly stoked this when I had my own subs take the Big 5 and basically everyone scored 90+ openness.
On surveys where the responses don’t track revealed preference at all you just get people confabulating their way into morally or aesthetically flattering answers left and right. The classic example of this is women insisting they don’t care at all about money or muscles and probably believing that quite sincerely despite their real-life dating record telling an entirely different story, but men certainly have our own versions of it: “I’m loyal,” “I’m locked in,” etc.
There are other failure modes, but you get the picture.
The primary issue with survey data—especially when it comes to sex and dating—is that the underlying epistemics themselves have a distinctly sexed valence.
To put it bluntly—most women are ideologically committed to socially enforcing a certain solemnity around their Stated Preference wherein men are implicitly obliged to take it wholly at face value or else be branded a resentful incel.
I also understand why women are like this.
They need to believe they’re dating the 6’5 financebro because he’s Good At Puzzles.
When you shrink the delta between Believed Preference and Revealed Preference it turns women into hookers or dykes—as evidenced by Zoomettes having a very small delta between the two and concomitantly higher rates of hooking and dykery—while materially shrinking the gap between Revealed Preference and Stated Preference tends to make low-status men incredibly resentful towards women, which is obviously the tendency you see among Zoomer boys.
These are kind of just the laws of social physics.
The problem is men don’t have the luxury of abrogating agency when it benefits us.
We NEED to have clean and correspondent heuristics for predicting female behavior if we’re going to get anywhere in life erotically, and some of those heuristics are going to offend the moral self-concept of women, which can’t be inhabited innocently if she is autistically hyperaware of the mechanisms of her own desire. It’s just the way it is.
So am I proposing epistemic siloes? Not necessarily.
What I think is that:
Survey data should ALWAYS be parsed with a skeptical eye aware of distortionary incentives, and interpreted entirely as what the participant wants to believe about herself
A man should take a woman’s moral and aesthetic self-concept moderately seriously if he’s attempting to court her in a long-term companionate container, and let her moralize and aestheticize things in stupid little womanways for the sake of the relationship instead of being a tremendous sperg about everything if possible, while also making fun of the Foid Gap between her RP and BP on occasion as a high leverage flirtation vector
Among ourselves men need to be ruthlessly candid about the nature of female desire, especially insofar as the trvth conflicts with institutional prestige grammar
Big 5 is about the best you can do getting a recursively powerful proxy for actual underlying traits that stand for something meaningful and can be replicated at scale, while MBTI is a useful framework for applying much of the same apparatus to Jungian archetypal thought. Almost everything else is about as “empirical” as astrology—which certainly isn’t to say it’s useless! But like astrology it’s basically all just a grammar for women to talk about their feelings in a cute and girly way, except with numbers to make them seem super smart and serious like the boyim
Social psychology is kidding itself if it seriously thinks it’s a proper science, as its epistemics are by and large naive realist dogshit
It can be mythopoetically true for you that you’re up for a promotion, just like it’s mythopoetically true for her that she’s only fucked six guys. Often such utterances are affective schelling points that enable you to act like they’re true in a way that makes them functionally true for the other person
Generally speaking men and women can’t communicate in a mutually dignified way unless your cum is presently leaking out of her
I have so many qualms that you addressed with this. From outside preference to personality, it's all fake and useless!