"Crystal has just 64 personality types, and humans rarely fit so neatly into any given box. But when I sent a dozen or so friends and family members their Crystal profiles, most of them were creeped out by how accurate they were"
That's not a good confirmation. Astrologers have been creeping people out by arbitrarily assigning them to one of just twelve personality types for centuries, so this seems hardly surprising. The Forer Effect is named after a study where people were all given the same 'personality profile' and yet they rated it as accurate.
Agreed. What might have been more informative would be to have instead sent them each other's profiles (or all the same profile) and see if they rated them as accurately when applied to themselves.
Not to step on jameshart's toes, but isn't that exactly the business model of astrology, using astronomical positions as a poor pseudorandom number generator to shuffle the profiles? They seem to do pretty well at convincing people not indoctrinated to make fun of them.
"Us+ creator Lauren McCarthy, an artist and programmer at New York University, told me that the tension her technology creates was part of her intent" what??
So the intent was to create an app that frustrates people and shows them "that there are things the computer can’t do as well as a human". We have this experience I'd argue the majority of time with computers anyway, the whole point is breaking down that barrier. So if her statements are not a joke its just bad software design.
Otherwise, the concept of realtime communication aid seems ridiculous IMO. Do we really need a software buffer between us and another human in order to communicate better? I still prefer talking to people on the phone as compared to chat, and face-to-face over the phone, I'd assert you always loose information once you add buffers between two communicating parties.
Yeah, Us+ looks like an app that totally failed technologically so the author now pretends that it's ironic. If that was her intention from the beginning, she's kind of a troll.
I do see how the concept of an emotion reader would be helpful for some people. In particular, I know people who could really use a "sarcasm" flashing on the screen because they seem to miss it.
It sounds like the intent with Us+ was to be performance art. In other words, if it's baffling or strange and it makes you reconsider how you think about something, it worked.
>This past fall I left Boston, after spending the past 5 years there. To deal with the emotionally and logistically overwhelming task of giving a goodbye hug to all of the acquaintances and friends I have accumulated over this time, I designed the Hands-Free-Auto-OK/GOOD/GREAT-BYE! Machine.
That's exactly where I stopped reading. I was thinking the whole time that the app should not alter the conversation directly, but only give prompts that can be used or ignored. It smelled of really bad design. Then I see an "artist" did that intentionally. Nope.
I've spent a lot of time reading about how to improve myself socially, and the gist of it is this: be honest.
If you give a false compliment, people can tell. If you aren't paying attention, people can tell. Even more importantly, YOU can tell.
Therefore it's more important to change your attitude to be a receptive, open minded, friendly one. In my opinion, this Crystal app seems to cheat the system. However, if you merely change your behavior to suit people's personalities, you lack a personality yourself, and you'll find it start to haunt you, as other people, no matter how bad they may be at subconsciously picking up signals, will likely catch on to your insincerity over time.
Our goal at Crystal isn't to game the system when communicating with others, but to help you be more aware of these personality differences (and show them at the right time with tools).
For example, my dad is extremely task oriented and logical. I'm the exact opposite. When I listen to him talk about something for an hour in extreme detail, understanding his personality helps me be a little more empathetic, as I know it's naturally something he's going to do.
Whilst I'm sure the underlying technology has amazing potential, the Moodies app sounds almost like it was designed for the type of scenario a satirist might dream up.
Person on first date glances at their phone every thirty seconds and wonders why the app seems to be implying the conversation is going downhill...
I do speech analysis for a living, and automated emotion detection from speech is fantastically hard.
I'm sure Moodies (and their parent company) is frantically dumping money into it, but it's likely an AI-Complete problem to get beyond the absolute simplest of metrics. No shock that it failed here.
So I took a dive and signed up for Crystal, then did a vanity search. I have to say I'm impressed with the analysis:
"Max prioritizes achievement, pursues goals aggressively and methodically, and doesn't like when someone makes a decision on his behalf."
That last one really does piss me off. The rest of the analysis is quite good as well. Basically I like it when people get to the point. It possibly gleaned that from my short writing style - I don't carry on, and I tend to write short emails and posts.
Not sure what I'll be using this for in general now that I am a subscriber, but next time I need to write an ice-breaker I think it would come in handy.
--EDIT-- It just occurred to me that this may be of the horoscope variety, where analysis is on the safe side and can apply to almost anyone. I may have been fooled!
"It just occurred to me that this may be of the horoscope variety, where analysis is on the safe side and can apply to almost anyone."
One of the better defenses is to look for where it is wrong, instead of where it is right. If it is really "correct", it shouldn't be wrong anywhere. In your own message, you highlight the thing that you think it really got right... is there anything it's really wrong about?
In a sentence that short, it's hard to tell, but if there's more content you didn't paste you can have a look at that.
Reading for myself the classic Forer text [1], sure, like everyone else, there's a lot of hits. But there's also a lot of huge misses, like, 100% diametrically-opposed wrong. It's not hard to tell a lot of the hits aren't all that direct either, if you look at them and ask "How many people would this be false of?" If the answer is "nearly 0%", then it's worthless.
I actually think your Crystal profile is more specific than that... it might describe a lot of HN people, but in general people do not pursue goals aggressively and methodically. (It's why "make goals and pursue them" is a frequent self-help message... for a lot of people the entire idea is a bit of a revelation! It may sound lamely obvious to $YOU but it isn't in general.)
"Stay positive and radiant today, Max. This is a great day for you to take control. Connect with others on group projects and feel free to offer creative input. Let the artist within take the spotlight, and cultivate this talent in any way you can. Take the time to engage in long conversations with people regarding recent events. You have a great deal to share."
That's really not so weird. In taste decisions (order a drink for me, decide what movie we're going to watch) I'm often glad to get outside my own head and try whatever you're into. In practical but short term or roughly equivalent consumer matters (which hotel are we booking, which rental car) I'm often happy not to have had to expend any executive function in choosing.
How much of the benefit of Crystal was due to just having a positive game plan for dealing with people that bolstered the author's confidence.
The comments from Crystal reminded me of horoscopes. They could be correct about lots of different people or perhaps be correct at certain times for most people.
Feeling like you know how to deal with people in an interview can be a majority of the challenge.
Hey Luke, Just some points that may help your UX process. I don't want to share on twitter before I know what it is. What if I find out your product is terrible (obviously I'm hoping it's not or I wouldn't have bothered signing up for an invite)? If you're going to get people to request an invite put it as the text on the signup button rather than leading on with false advertising. Chances are I won't checkout your product now that you've made me wait. I'l get an email but it will be one of tens or even hundreds and I'll skip over it as I'm in my inbox to do something else and it will soon be forgotten. Rory
At the bottom of the article it says it evolved from a talk she gave, so I would guess not. The article says she used it herself, and she does mention some of the competition, so I'd just guess she's a happy customer.
Yeah, there aren't any paid placements on hacker news that I know of. There are job listings for YC companies that start at/near the top and work their way down over time automatically.
I'm using noscript and when I went to the page I had the placeholder for a javascript element. I allowed it and it was a header image. Curious, I inspected the element and found they were converting the gif to video which looped. It looks like Fusion have developed a wordpress plugin called gif2html5 to do this: https://github.com/fusioneng/gif2html5-plugin
I am wondering why they would do this. I'm not a developer so is there any reason why they would rather play a video instead of a gif (when the source material is a gif to start with)? It doesn't really seem necessary to me but I'm probably missing something.
Crystal sounds impressive, then again underlying they might just have "universal personality descriptions" that fit everyone - like the astrological star signs.
> Theoretically, it can guide operators to course-correct during a call to win over an angry customer
It's more like I feel like I have to get heated during every customer service call I might make now-a-days (at least when it comes to big companies) since calmly and rationally explaining your problem seems to give much worse results and waste much more of your own time.
A real time "how to win friends and influence people!"
I enjoyed the book though, it was honest and generally tried to make you a better person. This seems really gross, and reminds me of this short Sci-Fi film: https://vimeo.com/46304267
That's not a good confirmation. Astrologers have been creeping people out by arbitrarily assigning them to one of just twelve personality types for centuries, so this seems hardly surprising. The Forer Effect is named after a study where people were all given the same 'personality profile' and yet they rated it as accurate.