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Comment by 0xfffafaCrash | Hacker News Reader

If say some person knows two people and that one tested as INTP and other as ESFJ and doesn't know for a fact who had which test results. Are you really sure they won't have better than even odds at figuring out which is which based on their interactions with the people that don't involve asking for their MBTI test results? If so, based on what study? If you can't demonstrate that, on what do you base that it has no predictive power?

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You bring up an interesting case I think even you failed to consider:

Since mbti essentially neuters it's own usefulness in the "round those percentages down to binary" stage, you could end up with a situation where an INTP and an ESFJ have only an 8% total difference in mbti-measured personality between them.

Oh absolutely. In fact I think there are those situations. My argument isn't that MBTI is effective in all individual cases to gauge much about them. My argument is that the ineffectiveness of MBTI at providing useful information to people on average has not been established. It's not been well researched in the first place and the research I've seen has been quite awful in their setup and analysis.

The question isn't whether people who are in the middle of each criteria exist and could easily swap classifications to their polar opposite. The question is what percentage of people would do that and whether it's high enough that there's too little signal to noise to extract any meaningful information out of the classification system.

>ineffectiveness of MBTI at providing useful information to people on average has not been established

Don't invert the burden of proof. It's up to the proponents of MBTI to demonstrate its effectiveness.

Well, since we know that 50% of people score different types upon retaking the test, that should be enough to identify the prevalence of these problem.

As for signal-to-noise, mbti is a useful tool for measuring the traits it measures, it just, for some reason, cuts the signal in half by removing the percentage from the label.

Without the percentages, you can never assume a persons traits don't hover at that middle ground. And thus, can never assume any part of their label is accurate.

If the occurrence of these hover cases were more like <4%, I'd be more inclined to agree with its usefulness, but as it is right now, the 4bit label, on its own, is just noise.

If 50% of people score the exact same type upon retaking the test, I consider that great evidence that there is relatively stable information in the indicator. As a baseline, remember that if the distribution of results was uniform, a null model would expect something on the order of 6.25% if the noise really drowned out all the signal.

absolutely agree with 0xfffafaCrash on this, just because a measure is imperfect and has varying levels of validity depending on the person doesn't mean it has no signal.

i'm pretty sure someone who has gotten INTP every single test in his life will behave differently on average than someone who has always gotten ESFJ

I agree that it has a use: it helps identify gullible people. Extremely valuable in that regard.

ha, got a laugh from that.

As an anecdote, I was able to predict my wife's results on the test, down to how strong her leanings were in each category.

I think its a mildly useful categorization which allows a simpler and more coarse view of personality than the full spectrum of data would normally allow.

Given the fact that repeated testing over a period often comes out with entirely different results - yes.

By "entirely different" you mean not the exact same classification or a classification independent of the previous classification? If the latter, the evidence does not support you.

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