Comments on A truly scientific personality test, anyone?

I recall doing it (finding these variables) with with a computer program long ago. It is called Principle Component Analysis.

To my knowledge, one of the most convincing studies (Eysenck, and others) use 5 main dimensions which seem intuitively significant and have been confirmed (at a degree unknown to me) by multidimensional analysis. See <URL: http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/eysenck.html>.
Btw I think Eysenck is one of the best psychologists of the XXth century, of the few to adhere to a strict methodology, devoid of prejudice, whether personal or political.
Given the difficulty in evaluating the efficiency of a mere computer whose components are perfectly known, I doubt personality tests are usable for precise practical use, that is to refine your impression after an interview. But the main advantage is automatization which filters out those you certainly don't want to retain.

HAve you heard about artificial intelligence defined through reversed psychological tests ?
Basically, you ask some hundreds of questions and want answers that are as truthful and explicit as possible from a very large array of people. You the ndevise a method of analyzing the data numerically through a clustering algorithm. You can always do that, depending on the degree of complexity of your algorithmic schemes and your means of statistical indicators (most of the times a simple corellation between what the answers were and how a shrink thought about the poeple who answered).
You then use a so-called artificial intelligence system (I could explain further, buit basically you have a mix of neural networks and genetic algorithms (as optimizin schemes for the NN) that are used to produced responses to given stimuli). That AI i sthen going to be your role-model for psychological experimentation.
You build as many AI as you had clusters (basically the Myers Briggs machines use 9 such AIs) and process anyone's answers through the AIs logic and you then get an appropriate filter telling you which of the AIs most corresponds to someone's answers.
Most recruiting companies do make use of these, but they also have people tested through the use of "human" psychologist… yet the last time we sent a student we wanted to hire, we cheated with the automatic response (by telling him what answers would be good…) and he succeeded, while his "oral" responses to the psychologist were (according to him) not that good…