The horror of personality tests is not that they don’t work, but that there is not a “real you” out there as a Platonic ideal that imbues your husk with animus and action.

It’s far worse than that, though. It’s that personality tests do work, but only in that very moment, because nearly all personality is situational, contingent, context-dependent. People want personality tests to be true because it tells them that they couldn’t be the concentration camp guard, the executioner. The murderer.

But the truth is that most of them would be up in that tower, shooting the escapees, severing the head. Burning down the village. That’s the horror: deep down, most people know this and they don’t want to know it.