Hacker News Reader

Comment by fredrik-j | Hacker News Reader

As a swede this is a bit embarrassing to me. I have a few friends who's bought into this completely, and of course bought the book. All without even a hint of critical thinking. It is hard to tell your friends they've been conned.

I can understand it to some extent. Here's someone, who claims he is a behavioral expert and scientist, and who offers a seemingly plausible simple method to understand yourself and other people, and how to use that method to efficiently interact and work with others. Who wouldn't want that?

Unfortunately the books are still sold. I've considered printing stickers that warns about the nonsense and sneak it on to copies in book stores. How else can we stop the proliferation of this junk?

View on HN

Well, some/many Japanese believe that blood type determines a lot about your personality, and Americans believe in Myers-Briggs types, and I'm sure there are local equivalents everywhere else too, so I wouldn't worry about it too much.

I always thought of Myers-Briggs as being about identifying the things you are less comfortable with and learning to address them. It's about identification of tendencies, not blaming a Gremlin.

Someone should do a talk on Pseudo-Psychology, the Good Parts. I had no idea what Myers-Briggs was actually meant to be used for.

Myers-Briggs is a proprietary test marketed by a commercial company. It is meant to extract money from corporate customers.

It has always struck me as odd when somebody insists Myers-Briggs has been "debunked". It asks a lot of questions about what amount to boundaries of your comfort zone. Of course as we age that zone changes, ideally, but sadly not always, by expanding.

Naming various borders of your comfort zone is useful if you want to push them back. If M-B has a failing, it is that its advocates never seem to suggest that being dead center on all axes is an ideal to strive for.

I suppose the issue with centrality is that not only can it indicate that you are both good at being an extrovert and good at being an introvert (when appropriate), but it can also indicate that you are bad at being extroverted and bad at being introverted when arguably called for by context.

I think what MBTI lacks is an appreciation of context - sometimes it's good to be Thinking, sometimes it is good to be Feeling. What individuals need to learn is 1. when each is appropriate and 2. if they're bad at doing one or the other, getting better at it.

"Debunked" is probably overstating it, but Myers-Briggs has been shown to have fairly significant statistical deficiencies and its predictive claims are largely pseudoscientific. It's not complete garbage, but there are personality trait models like Big Five and HEXACO that are more robust and have more research behind them, but even those are not as strong predictors as pop management literature makes them out to be.

I never considered it to have any predictive meaning at all, so saying it doesn't seems to miss the whole point.

Predicting others' behavior on the basis of a generic quiz is a pretty silly expectation.

It is definitely 100% gremlin: https://digg.com/2015/myers-briggs-secret-history

Also, https://www.vox.com/2014/7/15/5881947/myers-briggs-personali...

I am an American who does not “believe” in Myers-Briggs types and I know plenty more of the same.

There is nothing to "believe".

If it is useful in expanding your comfort zone, it's useful, full stop. If it's useful in helping to get along with people who are different from you, it's useful, full stop.

If it's not useful to you, that does not mean it is not useful to anybody else.

You can say that about punching people in the face, too.

Sure? And Floyd Mayweather has made significantly more money doing that than most of us will make in our lives. Different strokes for different folks.

I can, and I do.

Full stop, full stop.

Meyers-Briggs claims that

1. We all have specific preferences in the way we construe our experiences, and these preferences underlie our interests, needs, values, and motivation

2. The MBTI is an accurate measure of #1

There's also an implicit claim that each of the 4 dichotomies are well represented by a binary value.

There are far more claims made about it by Meyers and Briggs, but those 3 are baked into the MBTI test.

People have definitely had their comfort zone expanded by following advice in horoscopes, but that doesn't mean there's nothing to "believe" with regards to horoscopes.

I have never encountered anyone who claimed either of the above. The test results indicate a spectrum on each axis.

Horoscopes are useful to people otherwise inclined to get stuck in a rut. Likewise, the I Ching. You don't need to believe either one for it to be useful. Not believing is an intelligent response, but not everybody is so equipped. Intelligent people get stuck in ruts, too.

Well you are the first proponent of the MBTI I've encountered who has disagreed with those two statements. We clearly have very different experiences.

When I took the MBTI in secondary school, it was stressed that the specific point was to discover which of the 16 types you were, and that knowing which type you were would be helpful in life.

That is sad. Maybe criminally negligent, for the school. I slotted, initially, neatly into "architect", but I saw all the other slots as other ways to be, and to explore being.

As ("even") Heinlein said, specialization is for insects.

I did not say it was useful or useless, just that I do not believe in it (in fact, I don’t disbelieve it either), my comment was more pointing to the assumptions of cultural ontology in the parent comment.

If something as blatant as these colors was legitimately an inherent part of human psychology, how would it be that they were only discovered in the past decades? Wouldn't philosophers have noticed it thousands and thousands of years ago?

They did: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_temperaments

> Unfortunately the books are still sold. I've considered printing stickers that warns about the nonsense and sneak it on to copies in book stores.

Great idea! We should do that for Why We Sleep, too: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/

The article starts by stating fairly that the book's author is a professor of psychology and neuroscience and UC Berkeley.

The article author's homepage says:

> I'm an independent researcher with background in Economics, Mathematics, and Cognitive Science.

Since I don't have any prior knowledge of the area, I'm sure either of them could convince me of their argument. So I'm inclined to believe the published Berkeley professor over the unaffiliated independent reviewer.

(Or perhaps the auto-bio is being too modest?)

Credentials play no role in this fight. There are plenty of examples of credentialed people fabricating and lying. The author documents the lies pretty soundly.

As suggested by sister comment, consider the content of the well-cited review instead of being blinded by credentials.

>or perhaps the auto-bio is being too modest?

Human beings are perfectly capable of autodidactism.

I cover this objection in section 15.1 https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/#appendix-common-object...

One way to think of this is as an experiment itself. That is, do your friends have an increase in happiness and life enjoyment having read the book? If so, it may be worth tolerating if only for the placebo effect.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com