Numlock Sunday: January 20, 2019

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. Each week, I'll sit down with a writer behind one of the stories covered in a previous weekday edition for a casual conversation about the story they wrote.

This week, I spoke to my friend and former colleague Maggie Koerth-Baker, a science writer at FiveThirtyEight. Maggie’s work has appeared in Numlock several times, most recently her story about recycling. But she and Julia Wolfe just published a fascinating story about personality test the Big Five, and I wanted to dive in and talk about the science of personality testing.

We spoke about how extroverts and introverts don’t exist, how some forms of personality tests are better than others, and how dating a ‘Grammar Nazi’ can save a life.

Maggie can be found on FiveThirtyEight and on Twitter!

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Walt Hickey: Can you tell me a little bit about personality testing and how I should really start using it to define my personal, career, and major …