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Comment by _pzof | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

Full stop, full stop.

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