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The difference is that astrology is a starting point with zero correlation with who you are, while Myers-Briggs is a starting point with positive correlation with who you are. The positive correlation can be surprisingly helpful to understand differences between people.

However you don't need anything so complex for such a starting point. A classic demonstration that I saw was a large group of people who marked where they were on two lines. The first was how organized you were. The second was how extroverted you were. Based on this we divided into 4 groups, and began talking. It was surprising how much people in each group had in common. And how differently the groups behaved. The groups were:

Introverted and disorganized: Supporter. Good shoulder to cry on.

Introverted and organized: Analyst. They make good accountants.

Extroverted and disorganized: Promoter. High energy, lots of ideas, not a lot of carry through.

Extroverted and organized: Controller. They generally relate to, "My way or the highway."

I was in the Promoter quadrant. One of the things we had in common was that our spaces look like a tornado just tore through it, but please don't clean up because then we won't know where anything is. :-)

>"astrology is a starting point with zero correlation with who you are"

I would really doubt that it is zero, the relative position of the celestial bodies correlates with season. All sorts of human activities follow a yearly cycle, including birth rates and mortality rates. I have no doubt there is some correlation between astrological sign and personality.

I would take it further and say a good principle is that "everything is correlated with everything else", it is just a matter of the strength of the relationship. I will probably get downmodded for that, because it is in direct conflict the "null hypothesis" testing paradigm that has dominated data analysis for the last half century or so.

There are indeed measured weak correlations between seasons and personality. Things like your odds of being bipolar are higher if you were born in late winter, and lower for summer/early fall. (The same correlations exist in the Southern hemisphere, but with the obvious 6 month shift.)

However there aren't correlations between those known correlations and the traits that astrology says that you should have. Therefore there is no known correlation between your astrological description and your personality. And yes, people have attempted to measure this.

It all depends on the sample size. If sufficient money is put towards it you will find the correlation. People have also done studies on this for around 50 years, everything is correlated with everything else:

'The author once had occasion to use 700 subjects in a study of publie opinion. After a factor analysis of the results, the factors were correlated with individual-difference variables such as amount of education, age, income, sex, and others. In looking at the results I was happy to find so many "significant" correlations (under the null-hypothesis model)-indeed, nearly all correlations were significant, including ones that made little sense. Of course, with an N of 700 correlations as large as .08 are "beyond the .05 level." Many of the "significant" correlations were of no theoretical or practical importance.' https://www.gwern.net/docs/statistics/1960-nunnally.pdf

"One of the common experiences of research workers is the very high frequency with which significant results are obtained with large samples. Some years ago, the author had occasion to run a number of tests of significance on a battery of tests collected on about 60,000 subjects from all over the United States. Every test came out significant. Dividing the cards by such arbitrary criteria as east versus west of the Mississippi River, Maine versus the rest of the country, North versus South, etc., all produced significant differences in means. In some instances, the differences in the sample means were quite small, but nonetheless, the p values were all very low. Nunnally (1960) has reported a similar experience involving correlation coefficients on 700 subjects. Joseph Berkson (1938) made the observation almost 30 years ago in connection with chi-square" http://www.tc.umn.edu/~nydic001/docs/teaching/Fall2011_PSY38...

"...it is regularly found that almost all correlations or differences between means are statistically significant. See, for example, the papers by Bakan [1] and Nunnally [8]. Data currently being analyzed by Dr. David Lykken and myself, derived from a huge sample of over 55,000 Minnesota high school seniors, reveal statistically significant relationships in 91% of pairwise associations among a congeries of 45 miscellaneous variables such as sex, birth order, religious preference, number of siblings, vocational choice, club membership, college choice, mother’s education, dancing, interest in woodworking, liking for school, and the like. The 9% of non-significant associations are heavily concentrated among a small minority of variables having dubious reliability, or involving arbitrary groupings of non-homogeneous or non-monotonic sub-categories. The majority of variables exhibited significant relationships with all but three of the others, often at a very high confidence level (p < 10–6)." http://www.fisme.science.uu.nl/staff/christianb/downloads/me...

Yeah, everything is correlated with everything, and a principal component analysis will quickly sort out the source.

For example what songs you like is tied to what media you watch which is tied to what politics you have. And most of that is tied to how liberal vs conservative you are.

It doesn't take many principal components to make most of the remaining correlations very small.

But correlations between astrological descriptions and personality start off small. So small that astrology is not a useful starting point to understanding people.

>"astrology is not a useful starting point to understanding people."

I never said it was. My problem is with the prevailing philosophy of doing statistical tests on whether there is exactly zero effect/correlation, ie testing for deviation from noise/chance. It is the most destructive idea ever pushed by mathematicians.

> I have no doubt there is some correlation between astrological sign and personality.

There's no evidence of this, so you should have doubts.

Sure there is, I found thousands of papers on it with one simple search: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=season+of+birth

EG: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27310922 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25132151

I don't know much about astrology, but your "sign" is determined by the birthday right? From my understanding, it is basically a way of binning together sets of birthdays. There will probably be various artifacts and noise introduced by the binning process, but I am sure with large enough sample size you will see the correlation.

http://www.medicaldaily.com/how-birth-month-influences-perso...

No, you didn't anything relevant there about personality types; personality disorders are a vastly different subject.

> I don't know much about astrology,

Now we agree.

Well, I tried searching "Myers Briggs season", etc. I didn't find any data on it all. It is one of those topics... too many low quality (unscholarly: not citing references , etc) sources popped up so I won't waste any further time on it.

I assure you with large enough sample size you will find some correlations though.

> I assure you with large enough sample size you will find some correlations though.

I can correlations the drop in pirates with a rise in global temperature, so what... correlations don't mean a damn thing by themselves, that's just data-mining bias.

No, it is not data-mining bias. There really is a correlation. It is real, but realizing that has no usefulness at all.

The correlation with pirates is real too, that's my point, correlations don't mean anything. Only causation is meaningful. The only use of a correlation is as a starting point for finding causation.

Actually... I think causation may largely be a red herring as well. Our most successful models really do not incorporate it at all. They are in the form of F=ma or PV=nRT. There is no causality there.

Models are final solutions; causation is how you end up finding those final solutions: causation is understanding, it's vitally important.

I don't know much about astrology,

Then please kindly don't defend it.

but your "sign" is determined by the birthday right?

I have actually studied astrology. Serious astrologers loathe sun sign astrology.

I wasn't defending astrology, I was attacking the pseudoscientific thought process being used to attack astrology.

No, that doesn't work at all. OP is saying that he draws conclusions about someone's personality based on the Meyers-Briggs type with which they identify. That logic doesn't apply to the zodiac because your star-sign is based on your birthday. People don't lie about their birthday to become a Virgo. But they might fudge the answers to the Meyers-Briggs survey so they appear more "introverted" and "thinking". If you compare someone's self-view ("I'm an introvert!") with their behavior (definitely an extrovert), you can draw conclusions. This is more than "fun to talk about". It's standard practice in psychology.

That logic doesn't apply to the zodiac

Sure it does. I've met people who will say things like "My sun sign is Virgo, but my personality is dominated by my Sagittarius moon", and then later say something like "I'm going through Saturn return, no wonder Pisces is such an influence".

If you compare someone's self-view ("I'm an Aries!") with their behavior (definitely a Gemini), you can draw conclusions. It's standard practice in astrology.

maybe it's easier to be existential over essential with Myers-Briggs style systems? less rooted in the stars, though i guess overall humanity is now in a position to be getting smart about mixing and matching which references and metaphors work and which don't, depending on context. all abstractions are leaky, though it's easier with some to frame a flow of change.

e.g. later Wittgenstein, process relational, integral theory, chaos magic

There are a lot of worthless measures we use out there. Body Mass Index (BMI) is another one. This scale was developed in the mid 1800s and you can do a simple search to find tons of criticism on it. If you're overweight/obese, you will have a high BMI, but not everyone with high BMI is overweight (especially if you're very tall or very short).

Measuring Cholesterol is another one, since you can't actually change cholesterol via diet and it has no relation to heart disease either (source: http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/panel-suggests-stop-warni... ). But the pharmaceutical industry still wants doctors to prescribe Statins and pours tons of money into advertising them to people and doctors, even though they're terrible for you and worthless.

It's troubling when industry grasps onto these measures and makes business models out of them. Wide spread acceptance of measures like these moves them out of the realm of homeopathy or astrology and into the realm of what people believe as relevant scientific measure. They benefit industry, but not the individual. Advertising allows that industry to continue to grow at the expense of good relevant data.

Invisibilia ran a great episode on "the personality myth"[1] and I think it shows the difference between BMI and "personality tests". BMI might be worthless but it measures something that objectively exists. Is it useful? Maybe not. Personality tests measure something that we don't even know exists, personality.

The episode talks about research showing how we can understand ourselves better as sets of behavior that we exhibit in different contexts, more than as having a single personality.

Put in simple words, you maybe introvert in some contexts and extrovert in others, and theses behaviors can change over time. You ARE not AN introvert, you exhibit introvert behaviors in context.

[1]: http://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/482836315/the-person...

> Personality tests measure something that we don't even know exists, personality.

This sentence strikes me as odd, because subjectively, the one thing that shines through the most with people, even people I haven't seen in 20+ years, is a distinct (and possibly largely immutable) personality. In fact, a large part of why I was so shy growing up is because people's personalities were so "bright" that I felt intimidated. Not of course "bright" in a literal, measurable sense, but in an irrational qualitative sense. And therein lies the problem with trying to discuss it rationally.

To this day I perceive distinct personalities in every child and pet I encounter. Not sure if related, these exact same entities seem drawn to me for some reason. I have often heard a pet owner say "my pet has never acted this way before" around me (such as sitting in my lap when it has never done so with anyone).

I wonder if it simply reflects what I see in them. Anyway. My point is that the inability to discuss something rationally is not evidence for its nonexistence.

They never claimed evidence of nonexistence.

They claimed there's simply an absence of unambiguous evidence that it exists.

Thank you for the clarification.

My argument is then that we will never have evidence that it exists because evidence is rational and objective and its very reality and/or value is trapped in the irrational subjective eye of the beholder.

Trying to boil it down into, say, patterns of neuron activations would be like trying to boil down or derive the "value reality" of the Mona Lisa by analyzing and cataloguing the light wavelengths reflecting off of it.

The claim that we will never have evidence that it exists says more about your need to not have your belief in its existence questioned than it does about the actual likelihood of evidence being found in the affirmative or negative.

Everything we know about what "evidence" is, is measurable.

So what of the unmeasurables?

I have no idea what you're responding to now.

> There are a lot of worthless measures we use out there. Body Mass Index (BMI) is another one. This scale was developed in the mid 1800s and you can do a simple search to find tons of criticism on it. If you're overweight/obese, you will have a high BMI, but not everyone with high BMI is overweight (especially if you're very tall or very short).

The metric system was developed in the 1800s and you can do a simple search to find tons of criticism on it.

Being tall or short is accounted for by BMI, as it's a component of BMI. So that is not a problem.

The actual problem with BMI is that it attempts to measure body composition, but it assumes that fat is the only variable component of body composition. It's not--muscle can also vary. So people with a lot of muscle mass can have a very high BMI even if they have very little fat.

However, in practice this isn't a problem--nobody looks at a body builder and says they're fat because they have a high BMI. It's obvious when a high BMI is caused by fat and when it's caused by muscle.

BMI is a pragmatic way to measure body composition, which is effective for estimating body composition when body composition isn't obvious, such as in the case of a body builder. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either misinformed, or has political reasons for saying otherwise.

This is not to disagree with your overall point--industry does grasp into measurements and make business models out of them. But in the case of BMI, political interests have become invested in discrediting the BMI measurement, not in overcrediting it.

They are not remotely comparable, Meyers Briggs is descriptive, Astrology is prescriptive and it's the prescriptive part that is nonsense. There is no connection to your personality and your birth date. Meyers Briggs is a classification system that groups similar personalities, it does not prescribe what your personality is or should be.

> Meyers Briggs is description

It's impossible to describe personalities without implying value judgments.

I randomly took the first Google link found under 'Myers Briggs' and ended up here:

https://www.16personalities.com/intj-personality

'Ironically, it is often best for them to remain where they are comfortable – out of the spotlight...'

https://www.16personalities.com/infp-strengths-and-weaknesse...

'Too Idealistic – INFPs often take their idealism too far, setting themselves up for disappointment as, again and again, evil things happen in the world.'

The sites you list (and a lot of discussion on MBTI) take the judgments way too far. That's when a lot of people conclude MBTI is junk -- when they see these conclusions based on type.

MBTI is basically this: You have a set of observed traits, and from that set we can tell you other traits you likely have based on observing many others that share the same traits.

Or in other words... -Observe trait A -Observe trait B -Observe trait C -Extrapolate trait D -Extrapolate trait E

What those sites are doing is... -Observe trait A -Extrapolate traits C, M, Q, X, Z

I suggest you don't understand the distinction I'm making between descriptive and prescriptive.

Please provide your definition then, instead of leaving us all guessing?

I interpreted 'prescriptive' as making 'should' rather than 'is' statements.

Meyers Briggs is meant to be descriptive, but the preponderance of evidence shows that it is not, at all. In the corporate world discussion of MBTI very quickly becomes idiotically prescriptive. In my line if I see someone discuss MBTI with any level of passion or enthusiasm I have learned to distrust their evaluations of personalities and strengths/weaknesses, whether they refer to themselves or others.

> In the corporate world discussion of MBTI very quickly becomes idiotically prescriptive.

Misuse of a tool does not invalidate the tool.

Yes the uselessness of the tool invalidates the tool.

And yet, misuse of a tool does not invalidate the tool; MBTI can do something the big 5 can't, assign a category which aids in thinking about and understanding another person which as someone else in this discussion points out can be statistically mapped directly to the big 5 making it not at all a useless tool.

This is also true of astrology and MBTI has as much scientific validity and predictive value.

No one's disputing that a useless tool can be misused. They're questioning the use of useless tools at all. They give the illusion of understanding to those not interested in evidence.

> This is also true of astrology

False.

> and MBTI has as much scientific validity and predictive value.

As it can be mapped directly to the big 5, this is also false.

Psychologists don't even use it because of how completely useless and scientifically invalid.

http://www.vox.com/2014/7/15/5881947/myers-briggs-personalit...

| They are not remotely comparable

Oh dear, there seems to be an epidemic of people's comparators not working. You might want to start small: try comparing two oranges, then an orange and an apple. Before long you'll be comparing supernovas to salamanders!

(Or perhaps you meant the rather less categorical "I think they're very different". I harp on this because I find "not remotely comparable" excessively dismissive. It's fine to disagree, just don't act like there's no possible way the other person might have a valid point)

Oh dear, I don't care what you like to harp on, take your sarcasm and shove it.

Astrology is prescriptive

If you disregard the people who claim astrology is prescriptive, and pay attention to only those aspects of it that describe tendencies - all the most convincing astrology nuts I've met do this - it can be quite... warming.

Those tendencies are still linked to a birthdate which makes them prescriptive, you cannot ignore the prescriptive element of astrology without ignoring astrology entirely.

Being linked to your birthday has absolutely nothing to do with being prescriptive. Perhaps horoscopes are only prescriptive, but astrology as a whole is much broader than that.

I don't put faith in or know much about astrology, but I do know there are many different types and areas of astrology and not all of them have to do with telling you how to pick your lotto numbers tomorrow.

A lot of people talk about signs and astrology in terms of being able to read people and determine personality traits of others.

It has everything to do with it, and it doesn't matter how or what a lot of people talk about astrology in terms of, it's absolute horseshit regardless of how they try and justify it. The stars, planets, etc have no relationship to your personality in any way.

> don't put faith in or know much about astrology

You're right, you don't, so perhaps don't sit here and defend this pseudo-scientific nonsense that you know nothing about.

Myers-Briggs has a type label then assigns traits based on that label.

It's not clear to me how that's different.

Sure, you can choose your type by responding differently to the questions, or finding a "practitioner" who assigns a type you prefer, but the same applies to astrology: shop around until you hear what you want to here.

> Myers-Briggs has a type label then assigns traits based on that label.

False. It's exactly the opposite, the label doesn't assign the traits, rather the traits create the label; if your traits change so does the label, it's nothing more than a description of who you are now according to your own answers to those traits questions. And it aids greatly in think about yourself and others and how people differ and exactly in what ways they can differ.

> It's not clear to me how that's different.

Then learn more.

If I'm not mistaken, isn't "confirmation bias" basically the thing at play in the existence of both of these?