Welcome to the blog

This is Vectors of Mind, a newsletter about Machine Learning Psychometrics. My background is engineering, but my interest is in personality and language. For the past year I’ve been working on a methods paper that uses word vectors to derive the Big Five. Before making any grand claims, or even using the ideas, a lot of sensitivity analysis had to be done. It’s quite a long paper (70 pages + supplement + code), and finally in preprint. Now I’d like to get some backlog ideas out into the world. These are either too obvious or too tenuous to submit to the peer review process. Also, I have a day job, so don’t have the bandwidth or incentives to jump through all the hoops of the great academia glory machine.

Viewing personality through the lens of natural language processing has a lot of theory and history. It’s also quite easy to test new claims such as how narcissism relates to religiosity. As such, the hope is to maintain a biweekly cadence of posts into the foreseeable future. But, the best laid plans and all that. Welcome to the blog!