In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020) | Hacker News Reader

In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

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136 pointssouprock332 comments

I've never really understood the harsh criticisms of MBTI. It's not super predictive, but not to be honest, nothing else in psychology is either; the whole field is just not anywhere near the level of physics or chemistry (not to blame the researchers; predicting humans is very hard). The big 5 and I think more recently an 18 dimensional breakdown (using PCA or ICA?) just aren't that much better than MBTI, despite many online claims to the contrary.

Myers-Briggs at least has some small level of predictive power, so no, it's not like horoscopes. There was once a poll of engineers at the tech company I work at, and I think the results were like 70% INTJ, 25% INTP, and 5% other. If MBTI lacked all predictive power, you would expect a distribution roughly equivalent to that of the general population. Could people self-select what they "want" to be? Sure, but it's still predictive of something in that case.

The problem with these results is not that they're inaccurate, it's that people think they measure a permanent aspect of themselves. In truth, people's personalities are malleable - if you spend all your time working on a computer, you become more introverted - or at least, you start to express your introverted tendencies more strongly. If you switch jobs and have to spend all your days talking to people, you'll become more extroverted. From this perspective, of course a of a group of engineers personalities show high introversion. But are they introverted because they are engineers or engineers because they are introverted? Or is it a little from column A and a little from column B with a different ratio for each person measured?

In the end, Myers Briggs is harmful because it gives a simplistic view of something complicated, and makes people believe they are stuck with a particular personality. In reality all it does is give an estimate of your outlook on the day you took the test. Personality is emergent as a response to your needs to interact with the world given your current career, relationship, peer group, social standing, and so on. It's not fixed. Or at least, it's far less fixed and far more fluid than Myers Briggs would have you believe.

This is a nice, very readable article by a psychologist specialising in lifespan personality development: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/06/30/4840534...

"while personality traits are relatively stable over time, they can and often do gradually change across the life span. What's more, those changes are usually for the better. Many studies, including some of my own, show that most adults become more agreeable, conscientious and emotionally resilient as they age. But these changes tend to unfold across years or decades, rather than days or weeks"

The important word there is "tend". For most people their personality slowly shifts over decades. However, that doesn't mean faster change is impossible. People's personalities can change quickly, either due to life changing events or to intentional effort to change - for example, nearly anyone who is neurotic, depressed, anxious, easily angered, or similar who practices mindfulness daily for 6 months will experience a reduction in those aspects of their personality. Combine that with CBT, new hobbies, changing to a less stressful career, choosing better friends, more exercise, better diet, better sleep, and so on, and you'll experience even faster change. However, most people don't do this, especially when they are older, and hence the statistics show that changes tend to be slow.

Mindfulness isn’t necessary helpful by itself, nor is CBT. You also need to have the capacity to change, which is not a given.

In my case, unmedicated, my executive function is compromised. This means I lack the self-control necessary to regulate emotions and control what I’m paying attention to.

Your argument sounds like it's taken out of a motivational book.

You can do it! You can become a better person! You just need to change every single detail of your life and you will be a better person!

Well, I was trying to phrase it positively because the original example I came up with was that if your entire family dies in a car crash, it's likely to cause an instant, long lasting negative change in your personality. Guess I swung it too far in the other direction haha.

But changes can be negative in a less drastic way too. For example, I'm sure the forced isolation of the past year has brought out depressive tendencies in a lot of people. In the face of that, we do need to be reminded that we can take charge and make positive changes in ourselves and that there are tools like meditation or CBT to help us (although it's certainly not so easy or works so universally as suggested in certain motivational books).

Worth noting is that many psychologists are calling for the end of solitary confinement in the prison system citing the adverse effects it has on inmates personalities.

> In truth, people's personalities are malleable

That's what I observed myself - I can have different MBTI depending on situation and context. When "people change" it's mostly the context that changes, and a different personality is assumed like a role by the mind, as if the mind just wants to adapt to each situation as best possible.

Reminds me of the unlimited ability of GPT-3 to assume personalities and points of view, with the right trigger you can get it to be anyone. I'm not saying people's personalities are equally flexible but they do have a degree of context flexibility.

I think degree of malleability would be the most interesting personality facet to measure.

Anecdotally, I think it varies quite a bit between people and changes over time.

* In truth, people's personalities are malleable *

Thank you for saying that. There was an interview before Carl Jung passed away, where even he talked about how in certain situation where arch type changes. We all ought to view tests like Myer Briggs as a way to shade light on people and their ways of being.

I dunno? It seems my type is pretty much fixed between INFL and INTP.

Everyone thinks I’m extroverted because most of my job involves talking to people.

People's personality's certainly are malleable, but the MBTI does not purport to measure personality. It (attempts to) measure personality type. i.e. the underlying baseline from which your personality starts. At no point does it claim that people's personalities don't change. Of course they do.

Perhaps you are assuming that people are "tabula rasa" - blank slates - from which their personalities develop. The MBTI is a criticism of this: it asserts that there is variance in the nature component of people's personalities. That two people exposed to exactly the same environmental stimuli from birth will not react to it the same way.

IMO this is fairly obviously true if you think about it (even if you don't think the MBTI accurately describes the differences.)

> It (attempts to) measure personality type. i.e. the underlying baseline from which your personality starts.

Which proof do you have that such a thing exists? Underlying personality traits sounds to me like a theory of epicycles when a simpler more plausible theory exists.

I don't have proof. I'm merely correcting the parent on what the theory claims. That said, the only thing that "underlying baseline from which your personality starts" really claims is that there is a "nature" (as opposed to nurture) component to people's personalities.

While I'm sure not everyone would agree with that, it's not exactly implausible. Indeed it must surely seem likely to anyone who has observed how wildly differently young children react to the same situation. And has been borne out in twin studies, etc.

Now that doesn't mean that the MBTI has the right theory about the nature of the "nature" component, but my point is that if you are taking the MBTI to be a description of someone's total personality rather than just the nature component of their personality, then you are completely misconstruing what it is claiming.

As far as my understanding goes the nature vs. nurture debate in psychology is really old school. Like it was fairly concluded before The Bell Curve came out in the mid nineties and argued in favor of nature.

As I understand it that arguing nature vs. nurture usually stems from badly defined concepts often defined in terms of how they are measured (e. Operationally defined). What happens then is that you get a bunch of correlation between various concepts just because one concept pollutes into another, not because of how we are geared. Nature vs. nurture is also an awfully dualistic approach and completely misses (or ignores) interaction effects.

To tie this into this thread. GP is not saying that nurture defines personality as opposed to nature. They are simply claiming that it is malleable. How malleable, under which circumstances, malleable to what, which aspects, etc. are all still open questions which may be ascribed to ones genes (and maybe not; hence the open question). This is the interaction effect which the dualistic nature vs. nurture debate completely misses.

I would actually go further then GP and say that the question is flawed. Personality is not a useful psychological concept and does not describe behavior any better then, say, political leaning, religion, or how many languages you speak. That is to say, measuring personality and categorizing people based on personality traits brings us no closer in understanding human behavior. That is to say, measuring personalities and ascribing traits is not only harmful—like GP says—but also bad psychology.

esperent's comment that I originally replied to not only claims that personality is malleable (I completely agree), but that MBTI theory claims that is not. That represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what the theory is claiming.

> How malleable, under which circumstances, malleable to what, which aspects, etc. are all still open questions

Indeed. And the MBTI theory makes a specific and very interesting claim about this open question: that what is malleable, under which circumstances, etc varies between people. And furthermore, that there is an extent to which that variation follows certain set patterns (possibly as a strong statistical average with exceptions rather than a sure thing), such that we can classify people by which pattern(s) of malleability they follow.

This doesn't mean that all malleability is subject to these patterns. There can still be aspects that are common to all people, and aspects that are completely individual. But the claim is that there also some aspects that apply to group of peoples.

Of course, such a claim needs to be substantiated and the current evidence is mostly from clinical observation rather than scientific experimentation. But whether it is true or not there is good reason to believe that the lack of scientific evidence stems from a lack of ability to measure accurately because (as you say) mainstream psychology has very little to say on this topic at the moment and exactly how this aspect of the mind works is still considered an open question.

> That is to say, measuring personality and categorizing people based on personality traits brings us no closer in understanding human behavior. That is to say, measuring personalities and ascribing traits is not only harmful—like GP says—but also bad psychology.

I should note that the MBTI does NOT measure external traits. It (attempts to) measure an actual functional mechanism in the mind/brain (which it postulates to exist).

> The problem [is] that people think they measure a permanent aspect of themselves. In truth, people's personalities are malleable...

The one and only time I did the Myers-Briggs stuff, the speaker made it absolutely abundantly clear:

1) Traits were contextual. We're different around family, friends, coworkers, commuting into work... (Duh, right?)

2) Though people can fake traits, like an introvert acting extroverted, doing so requires more effort. So maybe ponder that your resting state traits are more likely the "real you".

2.1) The speaker used an ice berg metaphor, which stuck with me. People present an aspect of themselves in public. With effort, you can rotate your ice berg to show other aspects. Removing the effort allows the ice berg to find its resting state.

I’m a bit lost. Combining 1) and 2), it means the test is against contextual and “fakeable” traits ?

Setting apart 3), as I would imagine a rotated iceberg might not come back to a resting state identical to before the rotation.

If the goal is to predict anything, we could also assume that context will change with time (even working at the same company, people change, assignments change, incentives change).

All in all it feels like a super weird disclaimer for something that is supposed to be useful.

You're the exact same person at church, work, hanging out with your buddies watching sports (or playing board games), doorbelling for a political campaign, baby sitting your nieces, etc?

Per the article, your traits are on a spectrum. Not binary. You may be more extroverted at church and less at work.

While the article does mention non-"binarizing" (I prefer "non-discretizing" as the more common parlance) in the sense of treating the 4 dimensions as axes not buckets, the article does not mention context sensitivity like church-home, buddies, babysitting, same/opposite sex, older/younger, etc., etc.

I just don't understand which of these criticisms doesn't apply to the Big Five too.

They do. The best criticism I see on the Mayers Briggs is the one that attacks the whole notion of personality tests (including Mayers Briggs and the Big 5).

Big 5 is not an established scientific theory, it has never been. In fact in the field of psychology, personality is as useful as a concept as your astrological sign is. There is no evidence that personality trades exists outside of factor analyzing pen and paper tests, let alone that they can be measured and classified.

For personality to be a useful psychological concept it would need to be predictive of behavior. So far we have more evidence that religion has a bigger role then personality traits. E.g. studies find that the more religious people are the less they obey in the Milgram experiment, however there is no evidence that people that score highly on the agreeableness factor do.

> however there is no evidence that people that score highly on the agreeableness factor do.

I went and did some exploring of the literature and found a study[1] that seems to contradict this statement. E.g. they found a significant correlation between Agreeableness factor and obedience in the Milgram experiment. However, the effect size is fairly small. Political leaning was also significant with similar effect size, and this study has yet to be replicated.

[1]: https://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_01158395/document

Personality is mostly established by age 6. Its more plastic than people realise, but it can be altered over a long period of time. Trauma helps, in regards to the big 5, concienciousness is the easiest to change.

I’ve gotten downvoted every time I’ve come to the defense of Meyers Briggs on HN, so I’m happy to see a comment with more or less my view of it voted to the top for once.

I find it to be an extremely useful abstraction. Being honest with myself and really digging into how the cognitive functions “work” has been incredibly instructive and valuable in terms of further understanding myself. It’s a REALLY high level programming language, so if you want memory management, so to speak, you’ll be disappointed. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable.

You probably hit the wrong "bubble". This happens. Then there's the various groupthink fashions that come and go like weather patterns on various comment sites. I doubt HN is much different. Probably better on HN but I've seen some oddball voting patterns around BLM and similar.

This analogy breaks down though. High level languages can be slow or inefficient because they don’t map directly into reality, but they are still correct. MBTI and FFI just don’t really work at all ... they don’t predict much and if you took them too seriously as permanent traits you would make bad decisions.

> There was once a poll of engineers at the tech company I work at, and I think the results were like 70% INTJ, 25% INTP, and 5% other. If MBTI lacked all predictive power, you would expect a distribution roughly equivalent to that of the general population. Could people self-select what they "want" to be? Sure, but it's still predictive of something in that case.

I was once part of an accelerator that used the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument, which basically seemed like MBTI except with more fees. And it got very similar results for the engineers in the room. Introverted analysts.

And anecdotally, I know very few non INTJ engineers and the few that aren't are INTP (among those of us that have taken the test for career planning or personality testing for the workplace).

I get how it may not be a rigorous way to sort people, but I want some research on whether it at least clusters them.

Does that make the information actionable? Does being an INTJ allow a prediction on anything else other than being an INTJ?

What is the point in clustering them? If your team is 75% ravenclaw, 20% Hufflepuff and 5% other, how does that help? Are you going to go out and try to recruit a Slytherin?

What if your team is 45% Rachel, 15% Chandler, 20% Joey?

What benefit do you get from clustering people in this way?

You are spot on. I would suspect that everyone that I work with falling this cluster. You could sum us up as a bunch of nerdy engineers, and I don't think anyone would really take exception with that.

But it captures almost nothing except a very small range of behavior. We are very different people. 'Sally' lights up whenever she talks of her children, but mostly pines to be a librarian one day. we have cluster b people, we have Jokers and humorous people, perhaps a bit of Asperger's, adventurers and the meek, storytellers, partiers, tea totalers. One seems to live for firing people, another I'm pretty sure I cannot model another human mind. some of us paint, play music, others disdain that stuff. Jocks and couch potatoes.

Those that say they use the mtbi for self-understanding puzzle me, because it tells you nothing of any of these very human traits. knowing somebody has one of the cluster b traits for example tells you a lot about how you might need to modify your behavior to interact with them successfully in a work environment, and MB days nothing. I could go on and on on what it is not measuring.

Yeah we're engineers. I knew that. I didn't need the test.

In grad school I joined an extracurricular social society where you meet around a table with other grad students and discuss various topics selected in advance while eating pie and other goodies. Sort of like debate but without the structure or positions.

Anyway one time the topic was Myers Briggs and so we all filled out our profiles in advance so we'd have something to discuss.

It was a group of 20 people, and we discovered that 19 of us were INTJ. The other was INTP. That was when I decided the test has strong predictive power, for the same reason you did. Even if it's just able to predict a preference for discussing personality tests with a plate of cherry pie. INTJ has a background rate of about 2%.

Or INTJ is what you get when you answer questions in a way that you expect to be conforming to what your fellow grad students will respect, before going to a meeting and revealing your result to them.

No. That's a very clever and cynical viewpoint but realistically, none of us cared about that. It's not like these were peers in the same lab whose opinion mattered. Nor did anyone really have a strong opinion about meyers briggs categories. If anything it almost got a little embarassing after the first five replies to keep answering the same thing as the other people - like going to a restaurant and everyone ordering, one after the next, that they want the blueberry pancakes. You almost feel like an automaton instead of being a unique and creative individual.

Right, I didn't mean to imply that everyone was lying, I just think that wanting to fit in with a group is a strong subconscious drive in such situations.

Edit: I was curious and did a quick search what the scientific literature says about this, and it seems like it is an accepted problem, though there are techniques used to reduce the effects. To quote one study:

"Regarding the use of self-report personality inventories, meta-analytic results have indicated that applicants are able to, and actually do, deviate from honest responses in order to make a good impression (Alliger & Dwight, 2000; Viswesvaran & Ones, 1999). "

I read the book "What's Your Type?: The Story of the Myers-Briggs, and How Personality Testing Took Over the World" and learned it was a bit like Scientology a few decades ago.

Very secretive, offered a free personality test to lure you into lots of paid courses. They were selling courses to an astonishing percentage of large corporations.

There is no Church of Myers--Briggs, and no secrets. Everything is open.

There are charlatans in any field, and they will use anything. They all use money, but using money does not make you a charlatan. That corporate HR departments hire charlatans only demonstrates that HR departments will hire anybody willing to give the HR director a kickback.

I’ve always been amazed by how much of the self-development & improvement industry seems to be based off of Scientology!

My main criticism is it gives the impression the traits are bimodal when they're actually more modal, giving people the impression we're more dislike than similar.

I seem to recall seeing an MBTI result that showed a location on a quadrant for pairs of attributes? So you could see if you were really closer to or further from the origin. That might help with the false binary impression.

I thought all MBTI tests give you scores for each axis.

It does. And then people refer to themselves by four letter, read abour description of types by 4 letter and completely ignore the scale in it.

I've seen people call themselves xNTJ or INFx.

> It's not super predictive, but not to be honest, nothing else in psychology is either.

This is an often cited myth. Examples of psychological effects with high predictive powers include:

* The law of stimulus and response

* Priming

* Classical conditioning

* Reinforcement learning, which further includes positive reinforcement, punishment, etc.

* Plenty of neural models that predict behavioral anomalies after brain trauma.

* Plenty of social psychology models that predict how people behave inside groups.

* Heck even the linguist Noam Chomsky made an accurate psychological prediction based on cognitive psychology in how people acquire grammar.

I think you might be confusing psychology with psychometrics which is a sub-field of psychology which holds that any psychological effect is measurable and that operational definition is a good way to establish these effects. The whole field of psychometrics has a serious problem with predictive powers of their theories. Other modern fields of psychology on the other hand has a good track record of making theories that hold good predictive powers.

Something I wonder is if people within different occupations tend to interpret the questions differently. That would explain a trend in the results, unrelated to personality.

> people within different occupations tend to interpret the questions differently

There are also other types of ambiguity. For example when asking: "Do you keep your room in order?" - you might answer "yes" because that's what you do, but you only do it because it has been enforced into you over time, while if you were alone and free you'd keep it messy.

Do people respond with their instinctive reaction or with their trained reaction? Which one is the right answer? Depending on that you could get a different type.

There is even more ambiguity in questions like "Do you keep your room in order". First what order for some, is chaos for others. Second some people just lie to them self or ignore the truth. For example, how would a hoarder answer that question. So the self perception could differ much from the real behaviour.

Wouldn't the manner in which a person interprets questions be part of their personality, especially if that interpretation is consistent between e.g. high school and their time in industry (as mine was)?

Indeed that might be possible. In fact there may be sub categories within the popular categories with different behaviors, e.g., a poet whose symbol is INTJ might be a different personality than an engineer with the same symbol. This would be hard to sort out because there are vastly fewer poets than engineers.

Intelligence may play a role too. Two people with the same symbols but widely different intelligence may behave differently to the point where they are identified as having different personalities. I'm speaking broadly about intelligence without necessarily believing in IQ testing.

If the aim is to help conversation during a first date, as the post implies, then why not. If such an imprecise tool is used to determine your employability, or pay grade, or career path, or access to some vital services or housing, etc. then it's unacceptable.

The fact that HR professionals seem to love it is a strong indicator that it is bad and harmful.

The best that can be said of MBTI is that it has a slight correlation with one of the Big 5 dimensions. So it's not useless but it's close to useless. On the other hand it's expensive whereas the Big Five has been validated and it's free. Really MBTI is just a waste of time and money.

Not that correlation with Big 5 should be a determining factor, but...

The chart in the article shows that E/I is strongly correlated with extraversion, S/N is strongly correlated with openness, T/F is moderately correlated with agreeableness (and weakly with conscientiousness), and J/P is moderately correlated with conscientiousness (and weakly with openness).

It's not a slight correlation, so if MBTI is useless then so is Big 5. Again though, choosing Big 5 as the standard is arbitrary and unfair. That automatically judges all other systems as inferior, without examining their merit.

Only one of the two systems stands up to modern standards of psychological science. If you are an HR rep and you want to predict an applicant’s job performance, you are using inferior data if you choose an MBTI test. It may have other uses, like fostering a useful discussion during an interview, but there is a very real case in which it is inferior and 5-factor personality is the standard to be judged against.

If you place any weight on Ffi in recruitment you are also doing it wrong though. The studies reporting ffi correlations with real world outcomes give confidence intervals not prediction intervals. For individual cases it’s mostly just noise.

There's two main personality tests.

Big 5 is preferred by scientists. MBTI is preferred by people who are taking it to see which famous person (or fictional character) allegedly has the same personality.

The problem isn't just the test, it's the whole culture around MBTI. Yes, the test measures something, but you're not just getting a test, you're also getting a bunch of information on how to interpret the test.

You can always spot someone who takes MBTI seriously because they talk about introversion meaning they "lose energy by spending time with others and need to recharge by spending time alone".

Really? I certainly don't take MBTI seriously, but I use that as a rough definition of introversion.

Here is some potential to construct a personality meta-test: If you prefer Big 5 to MBTI, you are introverted; if you prefer MBTI to Big 5, you are extraverted. If you prefer either of them to horoscope, you are... blah blah blah... if you think all tests are problematic, you are judging; and if you are afraid you would fail at all of them, you are neurotic.

Agree completely, everything has to start from somewhere. Often it is a false start with nothing to gain. While MBTI was a small step, at least it was a forward step to better understanding vs the example you mentioned, "horoscopes", which past the fleeting interest into astronomy is just walking off a cliff into the void.

Scientific studies support the Big 5 or Hexaco model of personality. Sticking with MBTI is the same as saying the earth is flat despite evidence to the contrary. MBTI was not created Jung. But my two fans of Jung. There is a huge difference.

> Could people self-select what they "want" to be? Sure, but it's still predictive of something in that case.

Why would measuring self-selection be a good thing, why would that be a reason to use MBTI in your book, rather than a reason to avoid it? If it does measure self-selection, then what is the function or purpose of the test?

> I've never really understood the harsh criticisms of MBTI. It's not super predictive, but not to be honest, nothing else in psychology is either

The way psychologists see it, "this is much worst then usual uncertainity for many reasons".

Also, psychology and pop psychology are two different things.

Yeah, horoscopes are fun. I used to mess with my school by shuffling the horoscopes in the weekly newsletter. No one noticed or complained.

The purpose of horoscopes is to keep people from doing the same thing every day. It doesn't matter which sign you check, or even if you check the same one each time.

So, scrambling them did not interfere with what people used them for. There was no reason for anyone to complain. The astro-BS just randomizes assignments, so everybody doesn't all get the same advice at the same time.

You have spent years feeling smug, but the joke was on you all along.

I felt quite good actually both then and now. But you seem angrier than you should be. Certainly angrier than someone who would have wrote "It doesn't matter which sign you check" and actually meant it.

You interpreted them as being angry, but I think they were just laughing at you.

I am laughing at the mystery of existence. None of us have anything to be smug about, but we can laugh about it. Have to, really.

Accusations of being smug are usually made by people who chose a team and you've encroached or offended that team somehow. There's often an aspect of admonishment in using that word as well.

As for my part it wasn't based on arrogance as you'd likely expect. It was simply the result of a bet. I won that bet since no one noticed.

Obviously no one would ever notice.

Horoscopes are the archetypal example of a thing that doesn't matter. "Filler" is the newpaper term, also said of the stories laid out between the ads (which weren't). Nowadays we say "content".

Winning didn't mean you were any smarter than average; the other guy was an idiot. But despite horoscopes being maximally random before they got to you, to which you therefore added exactly none, they have a purpose and a valid use that you failed to perceive, year after year, since. I don't use them; but people who do are not, thereby, wrong.

So, your smugness is a case of imagining yourself smarter than you turned out to be. In life, few will explain your mistakes to you so carefully.

You're assuming the types are proportionally represented in the general population, which we have no reason the believe even if the test works as advertised. For all we know urban environments are 70% INTJ.

> For all we know urban environments are 70% INTJ.

There are 16 categories, which means you'd expect about 6% in each if the test sorts evenly. It doesn't; in fact only between 2% and 3% of the population is INTJ. Unless one of the questions is literally "are you a tech worker", that's very conspicuous selectivity.

On the other hand, a test with questions like 'are you a tech worker' might be a lot shorter and just as meaningful!

The test doesn't sort evenly. One of the most popular online test sites says in one of their descriptions - I forget which one - that "this is the rarest type with only x% of the population."

I had a female friend who was an INTJ, and told me that it was very rare among women. Being very, INTJ, she was referencing some rigorous statistics.

Yes, I mentioned in the next line that it doesn't sort evenly, and INTJ is particularly a minority.

INTJ is 2.1% of the population

https://personalitymax.com/personality-types/population-gend...

my big criticism is that they’re taken as constants, when they can be highly dynamic quantities in different contexts. that’s what makes personality types misleading and not that useful in real life (i.e., not very predictive).

Being predictive of something is the beef here. There is no sound theory of what that something is and what specifically it would predict.

Binning people into excel rows by an arbitrary process is one of the hallmarks of either a pseudoscientific hoax, or an entertaining but scientifically unremarkable party game.

You might as well divide people into Hogswarts houses by a similar test and it would serve similar purpose.

In other words, it's a pastime driven by fictional representation of human psyche. Some groups may find this exercise fun.

But this is no reason to stop hating Meyers-Brigs given it's driven by psedoscientific marketing. While it might not be harmful, it totally is a similar type of activity like homeopathy.

> I've never really understood the harsh criticisms of MBTI. It's not super predictive [...]

I think the problem might be that people are using it to 'predict' things.

> Myers-Briggs

Wikipedia will give you a lot of references to research as to why this is not considered science (or even science-adjacent).

Anecdotally, I have been subjected to these (or something very similar at least) as a condition of employment. It was so incredibly transparent that I chose a personality at the outset and 'achieved' that outcome.

Check the math in the article. (the correlation tables especially, both against the "Big 5" and for repeatability) If Myers-Briggs is not science, then the "Big 5" personality traits are also not science. They are tied together, each strongly predictive of the other. Results are repeatable, especially if not rounded to boolean values.

I'm going to suggest a hypothetical. Let's ignore any personality test specifics just to generalize.

Ok, so I have a candidate for a position, who shows +5% to "conscientiousness". What does that mean, practically, for me as an employer? It means exactly nothing, because that trait is so vague as to be ... meaningless. (That's just the start of the problems with these tests.)

Even if it M-B (or whatever) is a repeatable effect it has no value as a predictor of performance of a single individual. In aggregate, maybe... (but also no, see the wiki).

It's just people playing Management Consultant extracting money from Management.

Imagine you have a job that is highly detail-oriented. Perhaps data must be perfect or a number of steps must be followed but checking the employee's work might be cumbersome.

You have two applicants, roughly equal. One scores higher on conscientiousness ...

Do you believe that measurement is actually accurate?

Well, we were discussing the utility of such a test. I would assume that by the time we got to the point of utility, we would have agreed that the thing itself was valid. There's no point in discussing the utility of a thing that didn't work.

For somebody who admits having no idea what it's for, you seem awfully confident of your opinion.

> For somebody who admits having no idea what it's for

I'm sorry, what?

I did ask that as a rhetorical flourish in a different thread (as a response to you, in fact), but c'mon. You specifically said

> It's not science, or science-adjacent, or anything to do with science. It doesn't pretend to be. That's not what it's for.

I note that you didn't answer my other question: how do you justify its use if it's not 'science'.

EDIT: Btw, my allusion was to a comment by Stephen Fry in a debate. (Specifics are no doubt going to lead to more contention, so I'll omit them.)

Some people insist science=good, therefore not-science=not-good. But the world is bigger than that.

Your responsibility as a human is to discover value in things you encounter. Failing to find it is just failing, and says more about you than about things.

It's not science, or science-adjacent, or anything to do with science. It doesn't pretend to be. That's not what it's for.

You can always lie, about anything you like. You can put salt in the sugar bowl. You can substitute decaf in for the coffee at the office, and give everybody caffeine-withdrawl headaches. You can have your dog crap in the sandbox at the park. What do you imagine you would prove, by that? (I give you exactly one guess.)

All you did lying on the test was to land in a different box than if you had not lied. But one box is not better than another box, so what good did that do? It means somebody who looks and believes it will find it harder to communicate with you. What you achieved was to throw sand in the gears. Congratulations.

>> But one box is not better than another box, so what good did that do?

If one box was "you get the job" and the other was "rejected" -- I can see why people would lie to achieve one result or another.

That's a problem with using any personality test for hiring. Not just MBTI.

> All you did lying on the test was to land in a different box than if you had not lied.

Again, which is why I mentioned in my post that there are scientific problems with the field as a whole, so I don’t understand the undue targeting of MBTI compared to everything else. You realize people are prescribed or not prescribed controlled substances on the basis of their responses to other questionnaires, right? You can look up the DSM criteria and get a diagnosis for just about anything based on your responses.

Anybody using MB to choose how and whether to prescribe controlled substances is engaging in malpractice and should have their license revoked, post-haste, and probably should be incarcerated besides.

That said, the DSM has its own problems.

> That's not what it's for.

But what is it for then?

> It's not science, or science-adjacent, or anything to do with science. It doesn't pretend to be. That's not what it's for.

Ok, so what is it for? And how do you justify its use?

I've seen what it's being sold for/as.

If you do not see it how it would be useful, my recommendation is do not buy it.

I have not bought it, but I have used it. I justify using it because it is useful to me: It helps me understand how people very different from myself interact with their world. These other people are not wrong, just different. Remarkably often, the differences are quite comprehensible. It helps to organize those differences. The precise details of how to organize them are not especially important, because it is just a way to break up what would be a lot of confusing detail into chunks that minds can grasp more easily. If it matches how other people organize, then we can talk about it.

Certain ways of organizing differences satisfy more criteria than others, and so have attracted more people to use them. MB is one that does, and so has. That doesn't make other systems wrong; and that other systems exist doesn't make MB wrong, even if different systems are more useful in one place than another.

If the purpose is merely to understand how people different from you view the world, then why take the test at all, rather than just reading about the ~sixteen personality types MBTI distinguishes between? The MBTI consultant who administered the test to me couldn't answer that question.

Consultants are a whole other animal: astrologers willing to give HR directors kickbacks. What they say, or can't, is not informative.

If just reading the descriptions is enough for you, do that. Most people seem to need more structure.

I don't need to take the test to know which box I'm in. But I do need other people to take it, to know which box they fit in. Is this really hard to understand?

Some people find it helps them understand themselves better. And people usually want to understand people they're close to or work with.

The scale titles are terrible. Based on Kersey's work, I think of the four scales as answers to four questions:

(1) How do you get your batteries recharged: Extraverts do so by being with people, introverts by the world of ideas. (It's not about your social skills. I'm an introvert who can easily converse with strangers).

(2) How do you take in the world? Details, or larger, vaguer impressions. My wife's friend walks in after a 10 years absence and says "Oh, you got your couch recovered". That ain't me. You could paint the room purple and I wouldn't notice.

(3) How do you make decisions? From the gut, or by thinking about them. Thinking takes a lot longer, from the gut can be quick.

(4) How much need for closure do you have (firm plans vs playing it by ear, filing cabinets vs piles).

Anecdotally, I've found this useful to view myself, my wife, and the world, but it plays a little fast and loose with the science.

on question (1), there have been scientific researches that shows if you identify as "introvert" or "extrovert", it can be explained by your body's "efficiency" in releasing dopamine [1]

[1] https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2013/07/brain-chemistry-pla...

One fun intersection of this idea was my inattentive ADHD brain’s response to stimulants. I had identified as an introvert for basically my entire life until I got tested and treated. Suddenly I enjoyed going out, talking to people, and it didn’t drain me to the point of physical pain to interact with people for more than brief periods.

Made me realize a lot clearer that what makes me “me” is my brain and body chemistry that apparently isn’t that hard to change. Super existential crisis inducing.

I think I can kind of relate to the existential crisis, but I have decided that the other side of that coin is that you can intentionally build your own reality. Of course there is still plenty of things about life that you can't control, but you aren't necessarily stuck with some set of fixed personality traits and you can't decide to make something different out of yourself.

I seem to remember reading that introverts are more likely to suffer from depression.

I think the naming is intentional. The titles have to be short and simple, and none can be shameful. If you pick a shameful-sounding title like "neurotic" in the Big 5, few people would willingly admit to it and you certainly can't politely ask about it.

I suspect that in a business setting, "introvert" is also seen as a negative. The other MTBI symbols are confusing enough that nobody is likely to remember them off hand, so they are probably neutral. I would advise against self identifying as an introvert. Also, "conscientious" and "openness" probably each have only one right answer.

In a sales setting, being an introvert is probably a negative. In programming, it’s the overwhelming default I think.

> I'm an introvert who can easily converse with strangers

The 10 Aspects scale [1] has an easy answer to this. You might be the kind of introvert that is high in Enthusiasm and low in Assertiveness.

I've got a lot of people being puzzled when I told them I'm an introvert. They only knew my activated, event mode where I was just enthusiastic about sharing my ideas.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5863998_Between_Fac...

If your 1-4 are in I/E, S/N, F/T, P/J order then I have this instead:

(1 E/I) How much external stimulation do you prefer. this may be socialisation (Fe/Te), but it can be more general than that, to include things like physical sense stimulation (Se), and exposure to external ideas (Ne).

(2 S/N) I largely agree.

(3 F/T) Whether you focus primarily on values: good/bad (F) or facts (true/false) (T).

(4) What you've put for 3. Identical to Kahnmenan's Fast and Slow thinking.

Of course everyone has an expect of both sides of either dichotomy, but it is never-the-less useful to know where someone is inclined to place emphasis.

Yes, that 1-4 was my ordering. Interesting, alternative (external stimulation). As I think about external stimulation though, I wonder if being stimulated by people is fundamentally different from other stimulating things (art, ideas, the stimulation of being in nature). I'm guessing this is an area where the theory could fruitfully get more complex.

I took the MBTI in my early twenties, then forgot about it. I got into the much more scientific big-5 to understand different types of personalities, and in order to flesh out the possible ranges of behaviors in my mind. Then 10 years later I find myself going back to the MBTI. Why? Because I now understand it as a gateway to Jung ideas, which I find helpful during my current period of professional questionning.

Acording to what I understand, the original idea is that our minds all share basic different functions : thinking, feeling, sensing, intuition, each coming into an introverted or extraverted way. Depending on your lifepath, your self concept (ego) will ''cling'' to certain functions because of perceived talent, events, etc. Then, you will start to realize that you are weaker than what social norms dictate about using some other functions. You might also realize that you judge other for using their functions in an ''inferior'' way, and that some of yours are present but less agile than your favorites. That the last ones are subcounscious and silencious because using them (or seeing other using them) will trigger repressed emotions. Finally, that developping a healthy ego, containing workable 'stack' of cohesive functions which both fits your aspirations and society's expectation is hard. And that maybe one way, your mind will be fluid and adjust itself according to the situation.

> I now understand it as a gateway to Jung ideas, which I find helpful during my current period of professional questionning.

Jung's ideas are quite attractive, I'll give you that. We all love a good story, especially if feels so full of meaning.

That being said, I would point out that there are stories and good research that might be a lot more helpful. I would suggest: Chris Argyris work on management, especially his ideas around defensive-reasoning vs productive-reasoning. Toyota Kata work by Mike Rother might also be helpful. This is about switching to an evidence backed mode of thinking (scientific thinking).

Next would be Robert Kegan's work on constructive developmental framework and immunity to change. His work presents both a vision about human development and the obstacles we have in the way.

And finally, Carol Dweck's recent work on the foundation of personality. Here is a summary of that work.[1] It might be useful to understand how your own BEATs got entangled in your identity, which of them are useful, which are sabotaging you.

[1] http://www.progressfocused.com/2017/11/carol-dwecks-new-theo... Her

Hi pdamoc!

First of all I want to thank you for sharing modern authors. I was aware of Carol Dweck's older theories and Toyota management model. I do plan to learn from your suggestions. Have they been helpful in your career?

One of the fist thing I've noticed after I started Zen meditation training 5 years ago was that I had recurrent daydreams about killing my bosses. I switched position 3 times until I found myself in a toxic startup where I've burned out. I met a psycologist specialized in work related issues (very good with modern models) and it was helpful. I've learned how to manage my anxiety and to trust my self better.

I'm not certain that I would qualify Jung's ideas as 'attractive'. I understand what you mean by 'a good story', but my take on his work is that its a pre-scientific tool to look deeply into yourself. If it's not scary, your are not using it right. (A bit like zen meditation).

Right now I work as an IT consultant in a byzantine public organisation where failure is normalized or hidden. Knowing that I will not spend my life there makes it easy to cope with the day to day absurdity, and cashing that paycheck is nice during COVID. But the thing is, I dont care about money. According to FIRE metrics, I save over 50% of my income after tax. I have no kids and no responsabilities beyond myself.

Instead of bitching about corporate-employee life, I think I should move out of it. Why not go back to school and do a Phd (already Msc), start or join a meaningful startup? Also recently I made a list of professional achievements which make me proud and turned it into a presentation letter, and found potential employers based on that letter. I have an interview in another industry next week.

I have no problem with the scientific method. The thing is, your own life cannot be a randomized controlled trial. And unfortunalty, if you are suffering from strong emotional biases (like anxiety), trying to use a new model might not work because your will be biased in its usage. Learning from science is not sufficient to lead a meaningful life. Good relationships will also help you alot in your self reflexion challenges. Lastly, I think that learning to use your intuition is probably the best tool you have to work against a disfunctional self model, since by nature intuition is non-verbal and anti-model in the first place.

You are on the similar path as me. I'm happy you are finding help through Jung's work. The unconscious is vast and deep (both singular and plural). I've only scratched the surface but have learned so much.

The bit about the accomplishment letter as a catalyst for action is great. FIRE movement is also great because you are buying your Freedom.

The three words I focus on in my healing and exploration is Love, Freedom, and Truth. Meditate on those words (the true versions of the words) and see if they integrate with your systems.

For people into using science to describe these topics, look at "Depth Psychology".

The challenge of scientific thinking is becoming aware of the ways in which your mind might lead you to wrong conclusions. This is the Toyota way and what Chris Argyris calls productive reasoning. It is becoming aware of your cognitive biases [1] and using processes to overcome them. You don't need randomized controlled trials but you do need to emit hypotheses about your actions, act and then evaluate the results of your actions.

Mindful meditation has been proven useful and has helped me too. What also helped me was writing exercises (like the Self Authoring program [2] )

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Cognitiv...

[2] https://www.selfauthoring.com/

jplr9822, I just wanted to say thanks for this great reply, and that I would thoroughly enjoy reading an expanded version of this in long form. Cheers

I've got a PhD in psychology. I have things. I. could. say. about this topic. But I would like to emphasize, in the strongest of terms, that Cronbach's alpha is not a measurement of test-retest reliability. Cronbach's alpha is a measure to answer the question, "If we ask five questions to measure the same thing, how well do they agree?" Test-retest reliability says, "If we ask these same questions X days/months/years later, how likely is it we'll get the same answer?"

Past research on this latter form of reliability (test-retest) on the MBTI have found it to be quite weak; yes, I'm sure it's probably more favourable if you don't binarize the measures. But it's still weak. If you're interested, the references on the "Reliability" section of the Wiki page[1] is a decent place to start.

My biggest issue with the MBTI, however, is that it gets used to make important decisions like whether to hire someone, despite little to no evidence for its validity in terms of predicting on-the-job performance. And that's extremely concerning. Quite frankly, personality tests have very little place in hiring assessments at all -- often the primary dimension employers care about is conscientiousness, and those questions are generally too transparent to be reliable for someone who has a vested interest in getting a job. Are you really going to report that you are "someone who tends to be disorganized" when you're trying to get hired?

If you're an employer looking for ways to find the best candidates, then you have a responsibility to ensure that the methods you're using to test someone's fit are a reliable indicator of their actual fit. Interpret "fit" how you like, but generally speaking, you want measures that are going to actually tell you how well that person will do with the tasks they would be performing. You're going to have much better luck with a take-home assignment or temporary contract than you will reading the tea leaves of MBTI, or even using an established, valid test like the Big Five Inventory. These measures just aren't meant for what you're trying to use them for.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi...

Do you have any pointers for better studies regarding test-retake reliability with the MBTI and/or Big Five? The Wikipedia page does not appear to be helpful in this regard. As far as I can tell, every citation is regarding 16 discrete bins.

MBTI depends on Jung's personality type theory. Jung's ideas on personality are actually quite interesting and involve a lot of nuance. If you go and read Psychologial Types, you'll quickly realize that Jung developed his notions regarding personality as a tool for literary criticism. That is, to have a way to explain why authors, throughout history, took opposite stances on issues. For example, he begins the book by interpreting the Trinitarian and Christological debates at the dawn of Christianity. My takeaway is that Jung's typology is less of a science than it is a philosophy of the psyche, or even a philosophy on how the psyche expresses itself, and thus belongs more in the domain of the humanities.

I like MBTI as a shortcut to talk about Jung's theories. As a scientific tool, MBTI is obviously extremely blunt. Testing for your MBTI type is therefore not a very good idea, IMO. As far as I can tell, many people who really are into MBTI will rather try to "type" you in a guided conversation than you merely taking a test. This is much more in the spirit of analytical psychology anyhwow.

I like when people bring up Myers Briggs because it allows me quickly categorize them as "people who attach importance to personality types", and thereby make sweeping generalizations about them.

hahahahaha

I've always had mixed feelings regarding the Myres-Briggs test.

On the one hand I was surprised by its consistency - in my case, every time I take it (regardless of the implementation), I get the same result. This probably comes down to a combination of me sort of being able to anticipate what a question is about and the test's genuine descriptive power.

On the other hand, like pretty much everything psychology-related, this test feels like it's trying to impose a relatively simplistic order onto an area that we don't understand properly. I have a similar impression of the big five personality traits, as well as of the descriptions of pathologies in the DSM.

I think at the end of the day the Myers-Briggs and the Big Five probably have quite a bit of overlap. At their core they seem to describe personalities via a number of principal components or latent variables that differ a bit between the two models, but capture about the same amount of information.

> The great advantage of the the MBTI is exactly that it makes everyone feel like a beautiful special snowflake. The axes are chosen and named ingeniously so as to make them easy to reveal.

Considering that both models are hand-wavey borderline pseudo-science, I agree that the Myers-Briggs is the more palatable of the two.

Its good as a one-off. Then you feel all warm and fuzzy as you go "oh yeas this makes sense".

I did an experiment using these tests. I ran them every week. Did a different test from a different website. Very little consistency at all. I came to the conclusion it was a waste of time.

It's worse than a waste of time. It's harmful.

Summary: Myers-Briggs is a useful model, when a few adjustments are made.

1. Problems I've Discovered

1a. Myers-Briggs pigeon-holes people into one "personality type", and generalizes what they should think and do based on that. I think that's kind of silly and limiting.

1b. If you read the personality descriptions, it is favorable towards the "rare" types, describing them as brilliant geniuses, while the other types are portrayed as barely sentient worker drones. I think that's really condescending and divisive.

2. Adjustments I've Made

Nevertheless, I think the questions and the other text is a USEFUL tool for SELF-ASSESSMENT and also for UNDERSTANDING others, so I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Here is how I make Myers-Briggs make sense and fit into my other mental models:

2a. First, instead of four scales, I consider it an EIGHT-SCALE system, with each trait being its own measure. For example, you can be high on the introversion scale (needs alone time to recharge) and at the same time also be high on the extraversion scale (connects with others readily, needs socializing to thrive.) I think the worldwide quarantine made this obvious to many an self-described introvert.

This applies to all the other scales as well. You can be someone with intense feelings and at the same time a thorough and dedicated thinker, who sits down and combs their mental models for hours. You can be very good at listening to your intuition while also being highly perceptive to your senses. And you can have firm general rules about how things "should be", especially as one gets older, while still remaining to new possibilities.

2b. The other adjustment I have made is that I consider each scale to be a measure of how much ABILITY a person has developed and PRACTICING that trait. In other words, beyond natural predisposition, each person can grow considerably in any of these traits, provided they practice and apply it regularly.

Conclusion: People are neither introverts, nor extraverts, but both. People are both thinkers and feelers, both judgers and perceivers, and both intuiters and sensers.

> 2b. The other adjustment I have made is that I consider each scale to be a measure of how much ABILITY a person has developed and PRACTICING that trait. In other words, beyond natural predisposition, each person can grow considerably in any of these traits, provided they practice and apply it regularly.

I do think, at its best, this is what MBTI aims to emphasize: each of us is capable of developing those areas where we are deficient, be it introversion/extraversion, thinking/feeling, etc. Problems only arise when people treat these factors as static binaries. I’m mostly an MBTI agnostic, but I have been surprised at how consistently I have been typed as an INTP across the various versions of the test I have taken (including the ‘official’ one). I view it as a rough indicator of where I am at a particular moment in time, and the domains I can seek to develop to become a more ‘well-rounded’ person. I agree completely with you that, understood correctly, it can be a useful model when people view it as a means of growth. Not, I guess, to get too self-helpy about it.

You should probably read Myers-Briggs' book Gifts Differing, they do say it over and over again that traits are preferences.

I will look into that book, and maybe you can clarify it for me in the mean time.

If I need alone time to recharge, and also do not feel complete without socializing, am I an extravert or an introvert?

Myers Briggs is popular for the same reason astrology is popular. People like categorising personalities so they can generalise about behaviours and "understand" people better by associating them with a pigeon hole.

What is innovative about Myers Briggs is that it isn't limited like the horoscope by date of birth. If you want to be identified as a certain type, with Myers Briggs, all you have to do is answer the questions in a certain frame of mind. Contrast this agility with the rigidness of the horoscope, which requires the falsification of a birth certificate to change categories.

The article observes that if the Myers-Briggs axis are treated as continuous then they map very closely to the Big 5 personality traits. It seems to me that observation is substantially more important than the space it is given. If M-B is basically measuring 4 of the Big 5, that really sets up a lot of the rest of the conversation.

Why measure 4 of the big 5 when you can measure 5 of the 5? The complaint here seems to be that the names of the Big 5 should be changed to something more neutral (which is a pretty fair idea, they aren't well named).

Myers Briggs tests have profiles of each type usually. Big 5 tests don't.

The profiles seem more propagated by Keirsey Temperament type material (e.g. Please Understand Me). Their existence could be viewed as more of a downside of MB relative to Big 5 because they exaggerate the meaning of the measurement and/or category. { These profiles "read a lot into" the various categories - as do all the English names for axes/groups. }

EDIT1: Also B5 just names 5 axes instead of MB naming (4*2) groups which always bugged me. Beyond that, because B5 does not discretize, it puts the measurement error center stage. Emphasizing measurement error is a major positive for something already so vague.

EDIT2: Also, while situation, context, how well you slept, or whatever absolutely matter, I believe this vagueness underwrites much of the "MB is pseudoscience" hostility. To some, it's so vague as to be meaningless jibber-jabber. To others, it's specific enough to be just on this side of the "science" line. Even if you think it is science, science can clearly be misapplied by those who don't understand it, and this "science" probably is..a lot (as bemoaned by the article).

As the author @dyno-might points out in fledgling steps to harden the ideas, there could be an intermediate 'x' value for each of the 4 axes. He does not say how far out from the mean one has to be "to not be in 'x'". Far enough out for each of the 4 and, boom, 99% of people are XXXX. At that point, the tests become only outlier detectors (again modulated by other, unmeasured variables) discriminating only 1% of people. Note 0.317 is also about outside 1 standard deviation for a normal curve and assuming independence, for simplicity of the example, 0.317*4 = .01. At 1.25 SDs that goes to 0.002. (Not random values - @dyno-might's distributions looked a little platykurtic.) So, it might easily be the test is only very informative (i.e. maybe predictive) for a tiny fraction of people - so not exactly unscientific, but also not exactly very useful if "over-concluding" is likely for 99% to 99.9% of the "modal" test takers. Textual profiles (or book chapters!) can take that over-concluding from just binning up a few notches.

So, to fix the Big 5 tests:

1. Write up 32 profile descriptions, each with an inoffensive name.

2. Come up with less-offensive names for the Big 5 traits. You can't politely call somebody neurotic, even if it is true. Most people wouldn't admit to being neurotic. It's not nice to ask about that.

3. Somehow, make sure the old names like "neurotic" are dead and buried.

16personalities.com does this with the terms Assertive and Turbulent to represent the ends of the neuroticism spectrum.

“But the big 5 spell OCEAN, you can’t just make it be not a word,” they protest neurotically.

Hi, I'm the author of this post. Any way we can change the link to here: https://dynomight.net/in-defense-of-myers-briggs.html ?

This is a slightly updated version of the post (new links, slightly less unhinged language, and a link to this MBTI quiz that I made to promote non-binary axes: https://dynomight.net/mbti )

It was changed the other way. I originally posted with your suggested link, but then moments later it was a "404 Not Found" error page. Your web site might be unreliable. Also, until I found the other link, I was unaware that there were any images. I had seen only plain text. Currently there are images, but will they stay? Do you know what went wrong with the web site? Might it go back to being "404 Not Found" again?

If you are certain that your web site isn't going to go "404 Not Found" again, contact dang.

Sorry, I accidentally pushed it to live before I was finished revising it, then hurriedly (but not hurriedly enough, clearly) pulled it down again. Blame me, not the site.

Sure—changed from https://dynomight.home.blog/2020/06/12/in-defense-of-meyers-.... Thanks!

Thanks, the test was very refreshing. I really like the simplicity. As an anecdote, my result came out very close to the one from 16personalities.

I found this defense of Myers Briggs Type Index (MBTI) against the Big Five [1] OCEAN personality traits helpful. Neuroticism is a useful measure but has negative connotations that requires self-disclosure and, therefore, less likely to be shared with co-workers and acquaintances.

The advantage of MBTI is the value neutral labels that encourage sharing and discussion amongst laypeople. This is exactly why it is popular in corporate settings.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

I took M-B test and was surprised how accurate it was in describing my personality type. I suspect my personality traits are closer to endpoints of its scales, making it more precise for me.

Same for me. My MBTI personality portrait is so spot on that the feeling is that the test really is providing more information than you put in by answering the questions.

That said, a lot of people who took it didn't have that instant of perfect self-recognition- the results are often mixed.

The entire field of astrology is based on similar confirmation bias, very broad and vague assertions on character are likely to resonate on way or the other. That's the main reason I took this test with a grain of salt.

Here, let me paste random lines from the "16 personalities" website describing various types:

> $type may feel directionless or stuck unless they connect with a sense of purpose for their lives.

> Embracing the values of honesty, dedication and dignity, people with the $type personality type are valued for their clear advice and guidance, and they happily lead the way on difficult paths.

> This can earn them a reputation for inflexibility, a trait shared by all $type personalities, but it’s not because $type are arbitrarily stubborn, but because they truly believe that these values are what make society work.

> Despite all this, $type are definitely Introverts, surprising their friends further when they step out of the spotlight to be by themselves to recharge. Just because they are alone though, doesn’t mean people with the $type personality type sit idle – they take this time for introspection, assessing their principles. Rather than dwelling on the past or the future, $type think about who they are.

> These personalities can be both the boldest of dreamers and the bitterest of pessimists. $type believe that, through willpower and intelligence, they can achieve even the most challenging of goals. But they may be cynical about human nature more generally, assuming that most people are lazy, unimaginative, or simply doomed to mediocrity.

I took all these samples from different profiles randomly, and I relate to a certain extent to all of them. Obviously I cherry-picked a bit but it shows that if you want to believe that the test is working it won't be hard to confirm-bias any result that you get.

People are surprised by the daily horoscope in the paper too, even when they’re shuffled and relabeled.

- Double Blind Test - https://escholarship.org/content/qt0b40b045/qt0b40b045.pdf?t...

- Popular Horoscopes and the Barnum Effect - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00223980.1983.99...

- Using Daily Horoscopes to Demonstrate Expectancy Confirmation - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1207/S15328023TOP2702_08

”Prior expectations can lead a person to process information in a biased manner such that the expectations are confirmed. Despite its prevalence in everyday judgments, people lack insight into expectancy confirmation processes. The classroom demonstration we describe uses daily horoscopes to demonstrate the powerful effect that expectations can have on judgments. More students reported that the events of a recent day most closely matched the prediction for their particular astrological sign when the astrological signs were presented along with the predictions than when they were not.”

The theory behind Jung and MB deals with the idea of cognitive functions.

https://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/underst...

The underlying claim is that people's mental processes fall under these behaviors and from observation it appears that there are four pairs of functions. It is these functional stacks that determine the 16 buckets/types and not any sort of dichotomy of the letters.

1. The breakdown of the letters doesn't make any sense and doesn't appear to lead to any insight. This is a completely valid critique of how MBTI is being pitched and presented. But, at least personally, I find the cognitive functions at least point in the right direction after examining my own mental processes and what is present or absent.

2. If we are measuring the quality of a test to be how well it can repeat the same result, it is not surprising that once you get into a higher dimensionality of representing a person's personality that we don't have a great repeatable way to test. This is a product of both the test and the difficulty of conveying and capturing what it is trying to represent, and the general inexperience of people to be able to accurately enumerate their own thought process.

Happy to hop on zoom or discord and explain functions to anyone interested.

It doesn't matter so much if MBTI is "real" as much as the fact that it's constantly applied in the wrong ways.

Using MBTI / big five to help narrow down the selection of a sales candidate? Okay. Choosing only sales candidates with a specific MBTI / big five? Crap.

The first isn't good either. MBTI literature stresses it measures preferences not abilities.

An interesting thing about introversion/extroversion and testing: Assuming that I remember details right from a class I took over twenty years ago, taking caffeine before a test improves performance for introverts but not extroverts (unless I misremembered and it's the other way around). It's a remarkably strong result and one of the few strong results in experimental personality research.

What does "improve" mean on an introvert/extrovert test?

I think they mean improves performance on an unrelated skill/knowledge test, such as doing math problems. The benefit is realized either in introverts or extroverts apparently.

My wording was confusing: it would be on an unrelated skills test. I'm pretty sure it was introverts that improved because I remember thinking that I should make a point of getting some caffeine before future tests.

tl;dr is: this holds up as well as the "big 5" mathematically, but the naming avoids unpleasant terminology and the usual binary bucketing makes discussion quick and easy

Right now the tl;dr is 404 Not Found.

This now works:

https://dynomight.home.blog/2020/06/12/in-defense-of-meyers-...

I think they just happen to be reorganizing at the moment, without leaving a redirect.

Having taken this "test" a good number of years ago, and I remember I often did not have a proper straight answer to give. On many questions, I would want to say something like:

* You're mis-representing the choices.

* Well, you say that, but I'm not sure what it would actually mean.

* Depends on the circumstances.

* I'm not sure.

* I might choose one option and then regret it, and maybe switch to another.

* Those things don't contradict.

* I would have done something different early on which would preclude this scenario altogether.

* This question looks like an earlier one. I choose X there, but that doesn't sit well with me. Maybe I'll choose Y here for good measure.

* None of the above.

That’s why they sample each trait repeatedly through a dozen lenses. Just do it fast without thinking. Unless you’re STJ then I can’t help you. :-)

Whoever knows more personality type systems please share (no matter how credible or bizarre they are, just list). I bet I have seen at least at least one original brand personality type start-up presented here on HN some years ago and another brand new one advertised on Google+ when it was a thing. I have probably stumbled upon at least 6 or more but can't remember any other than MBTI, the Socionics, and the Enneagram. I'm very interested in this subject.

I have had to take the DISC inventory for one of my jobs, although it seems mostly derivative of antecedent personality inventories. I didn’t gain dramatically more insight into my own personality style from the DISC than I did from any other metric.

I’ll add to that the Strengthsfinder inventory. It’s clearly a consultancy gimmick, but I did find it somewhat meaningful in figuring out how to relate to colleagues with divergent ‘strengths’ from my own. It’s probably neither more nor less meaningful than any other personality inventory.

These days you’re likely to run into WPI or WPI-Pro, Workplace Personality Inventory for Professionals:

https://thepsychometricworld.com/wpi-pro/

The following is quoted from that link to save you a click:

WPI-Pro is a comprehensive work personality assessment tool developed and validated over several years of research and improvements. It helps you to make better selection and development decisions. In only 45 minutes you can have invaluable information about the candidate that could otherwise take months or even years to acquire. Over 5 years of rigorous research has shaped this unique psychometric test based on trait theory of personality (BIG FIVE MODEL) and is mapped on 80+ behavioral competencies.

WPI-Pro is designed and validated to cover a variety of job performance aspects including:

    - Leadership
    - Decision making
    - Organizing & prioritizing
    - Planning and coordination
    - Self motivation
    - Stress tolerance
    - Emotional resilience
    - Honesty and integrity
    - Team work
    - Interpersonal/Cross-cultural sensitivity 
    - … AND MANY MORE

I must say I was extremely amused when I took MBTI, that one of the last questions was essentially "did you think this test was a load of bollocks?"

It's like they created the test, administered it to a bunch of people to try it out, half of them said "your test is a load of bollocks", and they thought "hmm, well, the test can't be bollocks, so that must mean we've found another useful discriminator of personality types!".

For some reason, Myers-Briggs has gotten all of the publicity (all those high priced management consultants, I guess). I have found the Enneagram [0] to be just as useful (all the controversy about accuracy aside). It is a different flavor of a personality test and the spiritual growth connotations of it makes 'real' scientists discount it. But I think it provides useful info when you ignore all the surface level superficial writing about it and only read the books by Don Riso.

At the very least it is as interesting or even more than Myers-Briggs. I have found it useful for creating characters as part of the script writing process because it makes one think about internal psychological processes.

The main problem I think with Myers-Briggs, or even all of these things including the OCEAN model, is the general public not understanding their limitations and thus using them inappropriately as definitive or concrete sources of fixed information - like in interviews, HR assessments, etc. Myers-Briggs has been Agile-d(tm).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enneagram_of_Personality

I did an Enneagram last week. I'm doing a part-time MSc at the moment, and the last 2 weeks has been talking about these types of tests. I'm certainly on the "cynical" side in any test.

My Enneagram result was even in 4 of the 9 boxes. Wonderful.

With all these tests, it seems that many people think the categorisation is what matters, rather than what you do with the information. You could use them as an icebreaker on a teambuilding day I guess, but then you could probably use a 'what hogwarts house are you' or 'what game of thrones character are you' test from buzzfeed.

Maybe it's useful to create fictional characters of D&D backstories.

I can see that if you have an idea of the type of person you have on a team, you might know how to help them, and an idea of personality traits they may have could help -- if you're an introvert that likes time alone to recharge, knowing that some people are weird and like to recharge with other people may help, but then you're just as likely to get it wrong anyway - for example thinking "I won't invite X to the pub because they're an introvert that doesn't like being around people"

What's the utility of Myers-Briggs, Big Five, astrology, etc? What's the actionable advice?

Do they help me make better predictions?

After my occult phase (middle school), I had a longer skeptic phase. What kids today call "rationalist".

Then someone at a party told me "Astrology isn't about truth. It's just a way for people to talk about the human condition."

Huh. That kinda makes sense. So I stopped LARPing as Michael Shermer.

(More recently I tried the "belief as attire" stuff for a while. Now I think people are all about identity and wanting to belong to a group.)

Anyway. I'm fine with Myers-Briggs. It's no less true than any of the other stupid stuff we tell ourselves about our selves.

Throw enough marketing & psychology studies behind a "Which Muppets character are you?" quiz and you'd have something about as meaningful & actionable as MBTI.

When I first heard about it in grade 8, I thought it was the dumbest thing ever. The first pair, Introvert or Extrovert made sense. But I could never make up my mind on the rest: Intuitive or Sensing, Thinking or Feeling, Judging or Perceiving? I felt I could be either, depending upon mood.

Later I learned that these terms had hyperspecialized meanings, different from how most people use them in everyday speech, especially the latter two pairs (thinking and feeling, judging and perceiving).

Finally I heard that the last pair is some kind of key, which turns the meaning of the middle two pairs. If that does't make sense, that is expected. The letters are just symptoms of inner causes, called the Cognitive Functions, which only the most serious of devotees have heard of, and even fewer understand.

---

To go back to basics, it is obvious to me that personality is partly biological. Whether you are introvert or extrovert, for example, doesn't seem to be changeable by sheer force of will or even long, continuous practice. The genetic origin doesn't mean you will match your parents. Just like hair color or the shape of the nose, it can vary, and genes from both sides interact to form a unique child each time. Child 1 can be the polar opposite of Child 2, and things are reinvented once again with Child 3 --- and I don't think it's all explained by birth order. I think there are personality genes.

---

The best way I have found to approach Myers Briggs is backwards. Instead of taking a test or trying to understand the exact meaning of each letter, just read the prose descriptions of the 16. https://www.personalitypage.com/html/portraits.html I think you will find some familiar faces in there --- not only a few that sound like yourself but many that remind you of friends. And these are about how you are in default mode, when you are relaxed, not trying. Certainly you can imitate the others for a little while. But some things seem to go with your grain, and others against it. How are you when you behave automatically? That's all that it's about --- not your whole potential when you bring learning and effort into the mix. Some things that are easy and natural for others will always be harder for you, and vice versa.

So there's something to it. My main reservation is that I think 16 is too many, but only by a little. Maybe there are just 12 genetic types (which are further built upon by one's upbringing, experiences, etc., to make each of us unique).

---

As a final note, back to the Cognitive Functions, I think they may be hard to grapple with at first, but they are what make Myers Briggs distinctive. It is the only personality theory that posits that how you feel on the inside is often the opposite of how you appear on the outside. For example, I think I am probably an INFJ. Alone in my thoughts or in writing, I am analytical, logical, factual, always trying to come to judgment on this theory or that. But at a party I am open, agreeable (to a fault), even gregarious if my energy is up. Likewise someone else may feel in touch with humanity in their inner selves, but socially will come across as coolly decisive and a hard-nosed debater.

Sorta sounds like Enneagram types is what you're looking for?

Learning your MBTI type helps you learn what you work on. I'm currently exploring Carl Jung and performing my own red book style adventures to try to heAl and learn.

Have a growth mindset. Understand your defaults are just your defaults. Just like you have a dominant hand, you can still use your "weaker" hand, just takes practice. Utilize Love, Truth, and Freedom to drive thoughts and actions.

A fun game to play is see how the headline statements apply to astrology. Star sign is _way_ more reproducible than MBTI.

I've never seen anyone not use MTBI as a horoscope. I'm inclined to believe there's high likelihood that the measurements will be misused, even if it were measuring useful.

It seems strange that we've moved on from grouping and categorising people by race and sex but it's still acceptable to do so based on a few multiple choice questions.

This reads a lot like people defending D&D alignments.

Yes, but does it mean anything? Does it make useful predictions? Does it tell me the kinds of people to seek out or avoid, like the Chinese zodiac?

Such tests are for robots who lack the necessary gut feeling (aka EQ). E.g. hose who think, a good education will result in a good hire.

There cannot be a defense. Someone else telling you what kind of personality you really are is preposterous.

It seems the next scam on the matter is "the big 5".

Nope, all these do not work or account for peoples ability to change or simply...lie.

Look at how wrong Freud was in hindsight. These tests will be regarded like Freud's cacophony in the future.

Psychology today is not an accurate science at all. Interpret these tests with plenty of salt. There is no a little bit wrong, there is no a little bit pregnant.

Source: Wife is a psychologist.

I don't have an issue with Myers-Briggs or the Big 5 as ideas, or even as a first step towards a more rigorous science of human behavior. You have to start somewhere, right?

My issue is the premature adoption of it by corporations and businesses who treat it as though it is a settled science.

>You have to start somewhere, right?

Agreed, and I suspect from a scientific method perspective, MBTI is something that's being explored in reverse. We've got a strong feeling that these different axis exist, but haven't yet landed on a truly robust and reliable way to evaluate them. So it's a lot of fuzzy intuition about things still.

As long as these proponents explain the analog nature of the scales and the immaturity of the field as a whole, (which I know doesn't happen much), I don't see much harm in it. But I agree that outside of one's on personal insight, using it to make any sort of business decision is folly.

Why do you need to subject people to personality tests at all?

It uncomfortable and demeaning, not to mention that it make the business come of as lazy and unrelateable. If you need to know what type of person someone is, talk to them, take the time to learn if they’d be a good fit.

I no longer interview at companies who subject candidate to personality test. The best jobs I’ve ever worked have been where I talked directly with my future boss, often for more than an hour, no tests. The worst jobs all had quizes or personality tests.

What’s the use of a test that’s easily influence by a person mood, if you don’t take the time to understand why that person feels like that?

What isn't touched upon are the descriptions of the various attributes in mbti. Because each of those is a bit questionable. Like can't you be both thinking and feeling. Maybe according to the test you can't but that doesn't intuitively follow from those descriptions. That's why I like big five more. It just slaps you in the face with how bad your personality is.

I don't know how/why people defend this test.

1. It's inaccurate. And that's not just "technically true", it's very rare that the test reproduces results.

2. Jung's theories (the ones used in the test) aren't just "controversial". They're wrong. He says it himself, in the same document they used to create the test.

It is just a cash cow now.

The _biggest_ problem with the test is it is harmful, not helpful. People believe the results are accurate _and permanent_ and so division is created where in reality there is more overlap than difference.

It's also not good to tell people "these are good" followed up by "you have none of them and never will".

By the way: This is true of a _lot_ of IQ tests too: We're still debating what IQ is, nevermind how to measure it. So we definitely shouldn't be telling people the results of their IQ tests, most of which are also not reproducible.

But the data these tests collect is useful. We just shouldn't wield such aouthority about a theory with a lot of apparent leaks we can't explain. There's a better way

Psychology is a young field. Lots of kinks to work out still

Anecdotally I’ve taken an ‘official’ MBTI a few times over a couple decades, and always came out with the same results. I don’t think it’s magic or anything, but I also don’t think it hurts to reflect on how you interact with the world and those around you, and how those around you interact with you in return, and then try to identify some themes in those interactions to think about. I wouldn’t go making any grandiose proclamations from it, but as a conduit to some potentially beneficial reflection I see no harm in it either.

Getting different results is pretty common. But getting the same results isn't very rare. The article points to studies showing MBTI and Big 5 repeatability are comparable.

It was inspired by Jung's theories. It doesn't rely on them.

MBTI related literature stresses it measures preferences not abilities. It says no type is better than any other. And it tends to encourage developing what doesn't come naturally.

You can bin people in any number of arbitrary ways. Just the fact you can bin people does not make the binning usefull.

Meyers-Squid is equally valid as any other fiction driven binning process. Like dividing people into Hogswarts houses.

Stability alone is useless if the predictive qualities do not extend beyond the binning process. Being INTJ only predicts the next time you do the test (if the scoring is stable) you might be more likely to score INTJ again. It does not predict the tested persons’ life outcomes or performance at work, in personal OR statistical sense.

The scores don’t predict anything of value outside of the test framework. This is what it means to be useless pseudoscience. It can be a fun party game and thus be usable as a facilitation tool, but beyond that it’s useless (or harmfull if someone tries to use the scores for something like ’creating balanced teams’).

> predictive qualities do not extend beyond the binning process

I agree that these tests should not be used for the purpose of evaluating/predicting the "fit" of any individual in an organization from an HR or leadership perspective. They are helpful, imho, for understanding some characteristics of one's own personality and how it relates to others.

Personality is a real thing. It's also very complex so having some "bins" to structure how you (as an individual) think about it can be super useful. But yeah, in the hands of HR and other amateur psychologists it's not a useful tool.

Are you really saying that testing as intj (for example) doesn't correlate with anything? Because that seems incredibly unlikely. E.g. three years ago Slate Star Codex readers were surveyed and found to be 10 times more likely to be INTJ/INTP than the general population.

Statistically it would be very surprising if Meyers-Briggs score would not have correlations with some other samplings - but that does not make it any more relevant. The fact that you can bin answers does not make your questionnaire in any way relevant unless you have some theory how the binned statistic can be used outside of the scoring process. Meyers-Briggs is all about the scoring, and has no usable theory how that scoring could be used.

A correlation alone does not mean it "means anything". Accidental correlations are quite common. We also notice them really well and tend to give them more meaning beyond them being random events.

Picking only positive correlations from an arbitrary data set is also known as p-hacking - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging

Not particularly having a horse in this race, if a theory can't reliably make useful predictions, it's not a very useful theory. There's certainly something to be said about identifying correlations, but it isn't yet clear to me whether we can draw inferences based on those correlations to make useful predictions.

In the SSC example, I wouldn't be especially shocked if there are no useful inferences in either direction, but rather a confounding variable that makes it more likely for SSC readers to answer MBTI answers in a particular way. MBTI itself wouldn't necessarily have a lot to say about this factor. (And given the intellectual, self-aware content of SSC, it seems pretty likely to me that this is the case.)

There are tons of correlations, for example INTP/INTJ subreddits on Reddit being most popular while these types generally are one of the rarest. There's tons of things you can predict with this. INTPs are often going to face similar challenges and obstacles in life, there's similar things that will help them grow as a person that would not help other types.

Sure. Now can we do the same with the other fourteen types, or is the primary value here that there are two kinds of people: INTx and non-INTx?

There's probably some bias here, but I've only ever heard INTx specifically singled out when talking about MBTI. That suggests that MBTI may make too many clear distinctions where reality draws a much softer line. A coarser-grained theory is likely to have more predictive power and be more applicable. Alternatively, a fine-grained theory with the boundaries drawn differently, such as the Big Five, may better account for these softer distinctions.

I'm not saying this is definitively the case. I'm saying that a complex theory that makes a small set of predictions doesn't justify its weight. If MBTI does fall into that category, we should feel no qualms about finding something that works better for us.

(Personally, I get a lot more out of the Bartle taxonomy. Only four broad classifications, and more focused on what value one seeks from certain kinds of games. Not without its flaws, either.)

> INTPs are often going to face similar challenges and obstacles in life, there's similar things that will help them grow as a person that would not help other types.

I really am going to need a citation for this. Here's my new horse: there cannot be 16 broad (even with overlap) classes of obstacles and growth opportunities in life that are specific to each personality type. Humans are simultaneously too subtle for a personality test to provide this level of insight, and too similar for tactics to be inapplicable to all but one type of person. It smells like horoscopes, and there are only twelve of those.

We all have issues. Let's categorize those, not the personality types that we think correlate with them. It borders on claiming that the problems I have in life are because of something wrong with me, and not just the circumstances of life in general.

Talking about personality models seems to appeal to INTJs and INTPs more than anyone else. Never hearing about other types probably says something about your social circles too.

Have you looked into the "Cognitive Functions" that MBTI theory uses? If not, I'd recommend reading through the 101, 201, and 301 articles here https://personalityjunkie.com/typology-101/

To me I see "INTx" and think that makes no sense because INTJ and INTP have completely different functional stacks. INTJ's are dominant "Introverted Intuition" (Ni) followed by "Extraverted Feeling" (Fe), whereas INTP's are dominant "Introverted Thinking" (Ti) followed by "Extravert Inuition" (Ne). So they're basically completely different.

Once you have a functional stack, then the MBTI theory becomes a lot more subtle: not only does everyone have 4 our of the 8 functions in their stack covering both sides of each of the distinctions, but the relative strength of each of these functions can vary continuously.

And that's before you even get to variations based on experience, which the MBTI doesn't even attempt to describe (you'd typically use someone's MBTI type in conjunction with their life experience to explain their personality as a whole).

> Sure. Now can we do the same with the other fourteen types, or is the primary value here that there are two kinds of people: INTx and non-INTx?

I started with INTx to have at least one detailed, specific argument that there is correlation and MBTI is at least not completely meaningless. There's also a correlation between INTx and IQ, to go as scientific as we can here. Just search for IQ by personality type. Now you could say we are putting two completely meaningless metrics together. If they truly were, how could they have correlation?

Big Five is not the topic here. The argument is whether MBTI can have meaning and whether it can be useful. Let's say Big Five was better, it doesn't mean that MBTI is completely useless. And I'm not going to argue about Big Five vs MBTI.

> there cannot be 16 broad (even with overlap) classes of obstacles and growth opportunities in life that are specific to each personality type.

No one has made this claim. There are various obstacles and challenges in life, and the only claim is that some personality types are more LIKELY to face some obstacles and challenges than other personality types. E.g. INTX will LIKELY have to put in more conscious effort to improve social skills in order to better communicate with people. This already is useful information. It also gives insights into how a person thinks and perceives the world, if you go into how functions work and which personality types are more likely to use which functions to understand what is going on. If there are 16 categories you can get a quick understanding of what a person might be like if you know the MBTI type, which otherwise you would have to read tons of paper on that person to understand what he/she LIKELY is.

It's all a game of probabilities and spectrum. You could do statements like, this person is 65% I, 70% N, 75% T, 66% P, therefore there's likelihood of this person facing challenges with social situations being 80-90%. The way this person is likely to make decisions is to use internal thinking to make conclusions based on logical analysis. All of this can say a lot about the person just with 4 letters.

The more straightforward explanation is that the INTP/INTJ descriptions are much more exciting to someone with introverted traits than any other MBTI result. They are much more likely to be discussed for that reason alone. The glamor of the result affects its distribution, when in reality people who meet the description in a plausible way are quite rare and exceptional.

The actual influence seems to be N - I - T - P.

If you look at raw subscriber counts, but it may still be I - N if there are that many more extraverts.

https://www.reddit.com/r/entp/comments/56tfmi/of_subscribers...

INTJ and INTP sound awful to other introverts in my experience.

The population of people who get an INTP result might have quite many asperger spectrum non-neurotypicals among them. If MB contains an accidental asperger scoring system within itself it does not make it relevant in the _general case_ for other personality types.

That said if INTP can be used as a lodestar for creating asperger communities and peer-support groups it's not a bad thing. But it does not really validate MB in any way as a general purpose psychometric tool.

I personally filled an online MB questionnaire or two in adolescence and certainly found the INTP score as something that helped me acknowledge a few things about myself. But it was not really something I would call fundamentally important.

INTJ and INTP are basically the "coolest" introvert result of the Myers-Briggs. For a supposedly rare result, it's one of the most trumpeted online and one with which people identify the strongest. The description of the result is essentially what those introverted readers imagine themselves to be when reading rationalist literature.

Thinking INTJ and INTP descriptions sound cool says more about you than the descriptions.

The article covers reproducibility. The test does reliably reproduce results, at least if you don't quantize to boolean. Jung doesn't matter. Being a cash cow doesn't matter.

There is nothing in the field of psychology with better support than IQ. If you aren't going to accept IQ, then you've entirely tossed out the field of psychology. There is nothing left.

> There is nothing in the field of psychology with better support than IQ.

This is not true. See Wikipedia[0][1][2].

IQ actually holds little support, compared with (e.g.) bilateral sound recognition, or somatotopic arrangement on the postcentral gyrus. (Among psychologists, that is; IQ probably has more support amongst the general population, because it's pop-pseudoscience.)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_race_and_intell...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#IQ_testi...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Validity...

What we can say about iq tests is that they test something, and those results remain consistent through life. The results are positively correlated to many things (such as academic success. The people scoring a 9, the maximum result, on the tests used in the Swedish conscription live longer, etc...).

Had it been completely pop-pseudoscience it would not be used by, say, the Swedish school system as a tool to gauge whether someone has special needs that warrant another form of school with extra support. The tests used are however not the same as most people have done online, like WAIS (but for kids. Can't remember the name of it).

> The results are positively correlated to many things (such as academic success.

They would be so correlated even if they were a bad metric. Imagine a score that multiplies academic success and the highest Tetris score obtained within 100 miles of your birthplace, then subtracts 50 points if you're a girl. That would also be positively correlated with academic success.

IQ tests measure something, yes, but they're not magic. (See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law) I received a high-quality education including what amounts to IQ-test tuition (to pass an entrance exam); do you know of any studies that attempt to factor out this particular confounder?

IQ tests measure the g factor and also happen to be the best way to measure it. So those opposed to IQ should either come up with a better way to measure g or be open about their rejection of the existence of differences in cognitive abilities.

If the best way we have to measure something is very bad, perhaps it's best to say we just can't measure it and keep looking, rather than using a very bad measure. It's like instead of trying to invent scales, we kept trying to measure objects' mass by their volume, which happens to work decently for many common objects, bud fails spectacularly for others. And instead of admitting we just can't measure mass, we'd fill our bags based on volume, and be consistently annoyed when we found we can pick up the "heavier" bag of balloons, but can't pick up the "lighter" bag of bowling balls.

Don't you first have to define what you want to measure and demonstrate that it exists?

There's a pretty obvious false dichotomy between "rejection of the existence of differences in cognitive abilities" and assumption that such differences are as shallow as a single factor called g stably related to scores on a collection of pattern recognition tests.

> IQ tests measure the g factor

Ah, yes. The g factor: “that which is measured by IQ tests”.

The main arguments for IQ tests, as far as I understand, that they correlate with an assortment of cognitive metrics, which all correlate with each other. This is a question. “It's the g factor” is not an answer; you've just stuck a circularly-defined label on the question (or, rather, on a particular frequentist analysis of the question) and declared it solved.

The best evidence for the existence of the g factor are IQ tests, and IQ tests are optimized to measure the g factor.

Do you see a problem there?

The g factor—or more descriptively—the theory of general intelligence has little support outside of the field of psychometrics. And the field of psychometrics is not known for it’s scientific rigor. Needless to say, there is little reason to believe that the theory of general intelligence has any grounds in reality, nor that the g factor exists outside of an operationally defined concept that might not hold any descriptive power for human behavior outside of a narrow setting of pen and paper tests.

Raw IQ scores aren’t very stable over time. At 90+ peoples raw scores have dropped significantly vs age 30. Trauma, Alcoholism, and other diseases can also lower scores dramatically. You can correlate adult IQ’s with tests taken by 2 year olds, but the individual raw scores again vary significantly.

It seems stable because of how age is adjusting for and the huge sweet spot where 64.2% of the population is grouped between 85 and 115. Basically people with significant developmental disabilities at 5 don’t suddenly become normal, but an IQ of 180 at 5 isn’t stable long term.

At quantum scale or near the speed of light newtonian mechanics breaks down, so we know it a local approximation. However, for set circumstances it approximates it does it well. For many decades physists searched universally true theory to no avail.

My point is this, IQ seems to have signal. It probably doesn't hold up in extreme circumstances. Psychology in particular seems to have a difficult time holding large enough studies to find universal constants that we should accept that IQ might be the best local approxination for now.

That doesn’t support your original point. Color blindness is very persistent over time IQ isn’t. Sure +/- 7 IQ points sounds very accurate, but that can be more than a 30 percentile change from two different tests 1 month apart meaning the actual signal is very weak.

You can read papers saying IQ texts on 2 year olds are strongly correlated with adult IQ, but read the details and individual people’s scores varied wildly.

So sure in aggregate it seems consistent, but that’s largely an artifact of test design. Someone with mental handicaps so profound as to be non communicative will consistently score very low, it doesn’t mean much for the general population.

First of all, scores are normalized to age (you never compare 90 to 30 years olds. Only 90 to 90-ish year olds).

No serious IQ test claim to measure much more than 2 standard deviations up and down (meaning they all break down somewhere above 130-135 or below 70). I have done WISC/WAIS three times (as a part of a psychological assessment) and the conversion to IQ scores were within 3 points (the WAIS/WISC scale measures many different abilities, and can be converted to an "aggregate" IQ score). I asked about this and when people are healthy the tester said people tend to score very similarly on tests, even many years apart.

Yes, the score is computed relative to other 90 year olds, however people’s individual cognitive decline is heavily influenced by heath and behavior so individuals can move up or down significantly on a that relative scale. Thus the computed score at 3 doesn’t accurately predict someone’s score at 90 nearly as well as a test taken at 30 predicts someone’s score at 40.

The issue with the underlying raw score at 90+ is it doesn’t map very well to a bell curve. Many people are quite healthy but a significant number are drastically reduced from their younger self.

My high school transcripts show the results of IQ tests taken in the 4th and 6th grade. Between those two tests, my IQ had dropped by 10%.

What test was it? I have only taken one test (WAIS and WISC, which are more or less the same but for adults and children respectively). It takes about 1 to 1.5 hours and is done alone with the psychologist that administers it.

"as a tool to gauge whether someone has special needs that warrant another form of school with extra support"

Someone is using IQ tests for their intended purpose?!

To be fair the person you replied to wrote it’s the best accepted option in psychology.

Not that it’s actually useful.

Who really cares if psychology goes the way of the dodo?

If IQ is all the field has produced that’s of value and we’ve been doing grand engineering and science things since before it was around (grand in then contemporary context perhaps) what’s the field really getting us?

Does it build infrastructure, feed people, and heal wounds?

Given human propensity for shallow vanity and gatekeeping it often tends to be used along those lines.

Having a high IQ does not equal more political power over anyone.

> Does it build infrastructure, feed people, and heal wounds?

The answer to all these is yes.

> Build infrastructure

Maybe not build but affects design. Civil engineers often use models from cognitive psychologists during the planing phase. E.g. how tall and how luminescent should the traffic lights be to optimize energy savings without risking safety? Or close to a dense population center can we build an airport before the sound pollution starts posing public health risks? Or even: “Is it wise to build water pipes with lead?’

> Feed people

To the same extent that quantum mechanics feeds people, by granting jobs and building models, maybe optimize some aspects of food distribution. A psychologist certainly can affect what food people choose. Food companies have a bunch of psychologists working in their marketing. And governments might hire psychologists to help persuade people to eat healthier food.

> heal wounds

This one is easy. Depression is a deadly disease. Psychotherapy is our best way to treat mild to moderate depression. And even sever depression is best treated with drugs and psychotherapy. Psychologists are saving lives every day. You asked about feeding people above, many people have been cured of anorexia because of psychologists. Behavior therapy is the best way we know of to treat many phobias and obsessive compulsive behavior. PTSD can develop into deadly depression if left untreated. This is also prevented with psychotherapy.

Note that none of the above examples have anything to do with IQ. If IQ goes away, psychologists will still continue their work in improving and saving peoples lives with better infrastructure, better public health policies, and by literally healing (or at least treating) peoples wounds.

IQ—or more accurately the theory of general intelligence—is highly controversial inside the field of psychology. In fact a part from developmental psychologists—which might use IQ tests to determine if a child requires special needs—I bet by far most psychologists go their entire career without ever touching an IQ test or citing a paper because of IQ results.

It is true that the debate about general intelligence is huge. So you see a lot of papers written about it. But this is a subfield inside psychology (in fact a subfield of psychometrics which is a subfield of psychology; the whole field of psychometrics invoking skepticism among many scientist).

I’m gonna do you a favor and list sub-fields of psychology that work regardless of the theory of general intelligence and therefor work just fine without IQ:

* Cognitive psychology (and computational psychology)

* Neuropsychology

* Social psychology (and psychological sociology)

* Pathological Psychology and Psychiatry

* Developmental psychology (although they might use IQ tests; but for different reason as psychometricians do)

* Psychological first aid (not a science but a method; similar to paramedics but for trauma victims)

And here are some generic theories inside psychology which have nothing to do with—and might reject—the theory of general intelligence.

* Behaviorism

* Neurological determinism

* Evolutionary psychology

* Psychoanalysis

Even inside psychometrics (which is the believe that any psychological effect that exists is measurable; and that operational definition is a legitimate way to describe psychological effect) I bet there are people that reject the theory of general intelligence on the grounds that IQ is not measuring general intelligence, but something else.

> There is nothing in the field of psychology with better support than IQ. If you aren't going to accept IQ, then you've entirely tossed out the field of psychology. There is nothing left.

Huh. That's quite a bold and incorrect claim. Are you a psychologist?

Perhaps the word "psychometry" would have been better. There isn't any psychometric test more stable than IQ.

How do you define/consider “stable” this specific context?

That's a bit better, but confusing the statements "IQ is the most temporally stable psychometric construct" and "IQ is the only valid psychometric construct" is still egregious.

I don't read it that way, I think it's meant as 'if you reject IQ, you have raised your standards of evidence so high you must logically reject everything else in psychology/psychometry as well'. It's meant to highlight a contradiction.

Yes, if interpreted like that, I agree with it. What threw me off was "There's nothing left" part. I see now that I might've misinterpreted the meaning.

Thank you for the reactionary downvotes, but how about making an actual argument?

(self-reply because I can no longer edit the comment)

Let's hear it from a psychologist: "If you don’t buy IQ research, you might as well throw out all the rest of psychology." (Jordan Peterson)

https://youtu.be/D7Kn5p7TP_Y?t=2938

For anybody interested in personality research, I warmly recommend this lecture series, by the way. These are the basics, which psychology students learn at university.

Peterson is a jungian hack

Can you elaborate? I’m aware of his controversies in pop culture but I’d be interested in any disagreements within his academic field. I’ve heard him disagree with Angela Duckworth regarding her “grit” attribute but that’s the extent to which I’ve heard

I do not understand this statement as claiming that IQ is the entire content of the field of psychology. Do you?

No, of couse not, that would be a very, very strange claim. I agree with rcxdude's reading of the statement: 'if you reject IQ, you have raised your standards of evidence so high you must logically reject everything else in psychology/psychometry as well'

Jordan Peterson is a great example of the failing of Psychology in the academic world. I'll list some quotes by him below and you can decided weather or not he should be listened to, or if he is simply selling right wing propaganda on Youtube.

"If men are pushed too hard to feminize they will become more and more interested in harsh, fascist political ideology."

"the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence." [referring to men being placed higher than women in society]

""Peterson says that "disciplines like women's studies should be defunded", advising freshman students to avoid subjects like sociology, anthropology, English literature, ethnic studies, and racial studies, as well as other fields of study that he believes are corrupted by "post-modern neo-Marxists".""

He also has a bible series on YouTube that asserts that god created the appropriate hierarchy of man, and that it should not be tampered with. We should mold society on the archetype of the book of Genesis. Which in my humble opinion is simply Calvinism in the extreme.

Most of this can be found on YouTube or his Wikipedia page.

This is not to say everything he says is wrong, that would be silly. But I believe it should be approached with a heavy dose of skepticism.

>Most of this can be found on YouTube or his Wikipedia page.

Not a Peterson acolyte, a Jungian, or even right wing for that matter, but I'm a political philosophy junkie so I have some familiarity with Peterson's claims, mostly from watching debates and listening to arguments. And I will say this, your random out of context quoting, and hiding behind "check his Wikipedia page and YouTube yourself" is the same sophistry you're accusing him of. To give just one example, the claims around Western Civilization you bring up imply neo fascism, while they are in defense of Enlightenment ideals. Forget Peterson, there has been a debate between idealists and materialists about the value of Enlightenment ideals since the horrors of WWII (Frankfurt School being prominent critics), and a defense in the 90s by Idealists and classical liberals (The End of History) and an attacks by Postmodernists since the 70s (Foucault et. al).

Today there still is that debate, because the Postmodernist epistemology dominates and both other dominant alternatives, let's call them free market Western liberals and Marxists, don't agree. For you to summarize the debate Peterson weighs in on as a Western superiority is straight up manipulation on your part. You hide behind the manipulation by telling readers to go to his Wikipedia page and YouTube videos as if you've just cited something.

I do not believe I mentioned a single thing that you are talking about in your comment. I'm not entirely sure what you are talking about in your comment. You seem to have quite the bone to pick with postmodernism, something I left completely left unaddressed about Peterson.

I only implied that saying men will become fascists if they are feminized is ludicrous. Does "postmodernism" mean feminizing men? And I suggest that the idea of men having rightfully taken their god given place higher up the hierarchy of society, is Calvinistic, by definition this is true. Is this what you think is "western superiority"? because I don't think I've ever said those two words together in my life. I also don't think I quoted out of context. Though it seems you feel the context reaches as far back as the enlightenment, in this way I have not given a history of the world before judging Peterson's arguments as something that should be met with skepticism.

I really do mean to go check it out for yourself. All the quotes I grabbed were from the Wikipedia page, I have not hidden anything. I've seen very little of what Peterson has to say, but all of it strikes me as very crackpot like. If I were a professor and publishing psychology papers I do agree my "citations" would not be up to snuff. But I am not either of those things and was not attempting to cite him in that manner. I think there should be more proof to the legitimacy of Peterson being a scientist rather than my HN comment needing more proof that he is not.

We're not going to debate the ins and outs of whether his views or crazy or correct, not least because I don't agree with many of them, but also because I'm not interested in playing devil's advocate.

I just think it's not fair to quote - anyone - out of context, referencing a Wikipedia collection of a few quotations, and finger that as proof of insane or bad or incorrect views. Your explanation of his views is about as long or longer than the quotes you're referring to. These are extremely nuanced, complex issues, and to summarize with outrageous highlights (feminizing men, which you've brought up) is sophistry.

Peterson can be completely wrong, a bad intellectual, whatever you want to call him, but the correct thing is to understand the ideas that you disagree with without relying on an authority (The New Yorker, among others, which were quoted a few times in your Wikipedia article references) before calling them out, because they're not being portrayed accurately.

Your conclusion ("the failing of Psychology in the academic world") is not supported by your evidence.

You have demonstrated that there is one prominent psychologist who holds some fairly-obviously terrible and inaccurate beliefs, and is willing to trumpet them to anyone who will listen.

This is no more an indictment of the field of psychology than the occasional right-wing "climate scientist" Fox News brings out to "prove" that climate change is not real is an indictment of the field of climate science.

Many scientific fields likely have a handful of far-right kooks who would be happy to rack up YouTube views promulgating alt-right talking points dressed up in the trappings of science. That says very little about the state of their fields, and a great deal about the state of our nation. And YouTube.

I'm sorry. I was very murky with my wording. I was not trying to say that the field of Psychology had failed or was a failure. What I meant to say was that, our current state of academia has in this instance demonstrated "a" failure. That failure to me is highlighted by the comment I responded to when it was implied that Peterson's view was more "bonafide" because it was from a "real" psychologist. By all academic standards the commenter would be correct. Peterson is not only a Psychologists but also a professor, A widely published and cited one at that. One who has been afforded debates at collages with Sam Harris and Zizek. This to me is a failure of the academic world to distinguish between leaders of the field of psychology and crackpot YouTube personalities. By credentials alone he is both and this is unnerving to me.

That said, of course, I do not believe that it speaks to psychology as a whole. But again I poorly worded that sentence and take responsibility for the misunderstanding. I would only add that I think, and I may very well be wrong, that if a physicist were to parrot "free-energy/perpetual-motion" to anyone that would listen, that person would be promptly removed from teaching at any legitimate university. That is not to say physics is better than psychology, if anything it implies that it is easier than the still very important soft sciences.

I agree with your points re. Myers-Briggs, however modern IQ tests are generally regarded as pretty reproducible and an individual’s score remains quite stable over long periods of time. Confidence intervals are about 10 points for decent tests. [1]

They are not perfect of course, but it’s a little unfair to compare MB with IQ tests in this manner. I know you caveated your comment by saying that not all IQ Tests are like this, which is certainly true. However, I see no statistical reason not to tell people the result of a high-quality IQ test.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Reliabil...

>2. Jung's theories (the ones used in the test) aren't just "controversial". They're wrong. He says it himself, in the same document they used to create the test.

Not a Jungian, but the "wrong" claim is a bold one, in reference to Jung's theories. Are they even falsifiable ? Psychology isn't a hard science. For example, how could you falsify something like the idea of archetypes?

Not trying to be an ass, but i think "hard science" is a bad term. Psychology is a young, very complex science. Real psychology really started with Freud, and yes he was inaccurate. Way better than the understanding of human behavior at the time (wandering womb, look it up), way off the mark these days. We're talking about less than 100 years of real research in the field. Electricity, physics, chemistry and even modern atomic theory (1803) have plenty more time in comparison. Freud had to escape the Nazis, just so you have a general timeline. We dont look back to the 1800s at all the cats that made atomic models and go, "what a bunch of fuck ups". They were building up on knowledge. In some respects, they weren't necessarily wrong, just insufficient.

I dont understand the pop culture enjoyment of trashing psychology turn. Every real psychologist in practice and in research are the first to admit how little we know, how incredibly complex it is (meaning we still dont even know all the moving parts involved) and the fact we are still at the starting line. The fact is, we're trying to understand the human mind with millions of broken examples. Learning to rebuild a car using old, junk, crashed, broken, pillaged and uncooperatively hostile junkyard cars isnt an easy feat especially if you dont know what a functional car looks like.

Though, Myers Briggs was just a cash grab with some cliff notes on Jung. Its an intelligentsia zodiac horoscope. Cute, fun, dont take it seriously.

> 1. It's inaccurate.

Reproducibility is most directly correlated against certain identifiers. For example no matter where or how I take a MB assessment I am always INTP. This indicates that for some persons, as associated to certain scored identifiers, this test is always reproducible. That is less a flaw in this test than the test subjects and further suggests MB becomes more valid when correlated with other tests that measure self-awareness and objectivity. The same persons that score poorly on objectivity are the ones less likely (less capable) to accept that suggestiveness and sensitivity are greater culprits in their measures.

Same here. I have taken the test multiple times throughout my life and I get INTP every single time. The description is completely accurate too, down to the individual nuances describing an INTP. It’s frighteningly accurate.

I wonder if less common MBTI types are more accurately defined.

I don’t think it’s a matter of either assessment description or population percentage but rather a measure of confidence on questions where a persons may, outside of testing, otherwise defer to social reinforcement.

I get the same Hogwarts house every time I take that test too.

You are aware of the Barnum effect, I presume? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect)

I'm aware of this effect and I never cared for horoscopes, Harry Potter houses and what not.

But INTP description is very specific.

> Chief among Logicians’ interests is exploring and building models for underlying principles and ideas, even going so far as to find these concepts, in their own way, beautiful – this makes them natural mathematicians, systems analysts, and career scientists, especially in more abstract fields such as physics.

Maybe 5% of population would identify with this?

> Logicians are known for their brilliant theories and unrelenting logic – in fact, they are considered the most logically precise of all the personality types. They love patterns, and spotting discrepancies between statements could almost be described as a hobby, making it a bad idea to lie to a Logician.

Maybe 20% of population would identify with this?

[0] https://www.16personalities.com/intp-personality

Can you distinguish yourself from the INTJ description? This was my main problem with the personality types: I agreed wholeheartedly with the (rather long!) descriptions of maybe five of the sixteen.

Anecdotally, whenever I’ve read all 16 descriptions on a site, only one has ever “felt” like me. I’ve never done it blind (reading the descriptions without knowing the types), but each one does come across as distinctive enough that they can’t just be accused of being Barnum phrases.

Another quirk is that the only people who are going to advocate for these tests are those for who felt their own results were highly descriptive and meaningful to them. So they’re useful in that personal sense, one can point to a few paragraphs of text and say “look, this describes how I think and see the world, read this if you want to understand me better”. To me that undeniably has utility, even if it’s only for a minority of the population (assuming most people sit somewhere in the middle of the bell curves and therefore don’t identify that strong with any of that types).

> I have taken the test multiple times throughout my life and I get INTP every single time.

Are you aware of Hobson's Choice?

You have good points there. From reading the article, the inaccuracy is by inappropriately classifying people into groups, and the groupings lack sensitivity. As you also point out the underlying theoretical framework is also wrong. The article does point out that the Myers Briggs does correlate reasonably well with four of the big 5 though. Having said that I would definitely discourage use of the Myers-Briggs.

The original author has a good point about the naming of the big 5 factors though.

Two things I take issue with though - IQ is reasonably well understood in that we know it measures something reliably and accurately. Exactly what that thing is though, is not really understood - and probably can't be. And how it relates to the real world is also somewhat poorly understood, and may not be possible to fully understand. But it does have good ecological and construct validity. I'm talking about good IQ tests here - any less validation than the huge amount that the Wescheler scales go through and the validation is questionable. I'm aware of the racial biases in IQ testing which is a significant problem.

Psychology isn't a particular young science - big chunks of modern statistical analysis have their roots in 19th and early 20th century psychology. So psychology is a young science in the same sense that modern statistics is. Back when I was studying psychology 20 to 30 years ago, a lot of what is now called "neuroscience" was then called "cognitive science" or more rarely "cognitive neuroscience". Neuroscience sounds sexier though.

I do have a massive issue how many social scientists abuse psychometric techniques in inappropriate ways. Management research is particularly guilty here, and I've been pressured into doing this kind of inappropriate analysis in the past.

So IQ measures something, but we don't know what and we don't know how it impacts the real world. How can we meaningfully say it measures something then?

The main issue is we know IQ is meaningfully correlated with real world outcomes, but also that real world environments are meaningfully correlated with ranges of (non-normalised) IQ in a way we can't adequately explain or replicate. It's less obviously correlated with prior knowledge than most tests, but still very trainable (especially if you're a neural network with no generalised reasoning ability whatsoever...)

And like all types of performance test the "something" it measures is a vector of pattern matching ability (both the component generalisable to solving more difficult problems and the component that doesn't except in the domain of career-relevant tests) but also other things obviously correlated with future performance but not fitting most people's definition of intelligence (attitude towards test, comfort in guessing, time management in timed tests, and to a degree experience), so whilst we know what the scale of the apparent impact is, we don't know really know what's behind the cause

Without having a horse in a race, it's probably the idea that the results persist between multiple tests and vary by who's taking the test. Persistence seems like a decent lower standard to say that there's _something_ present, even if you're not quite sure what it is.

Well, for example, you can definitely see variations in people's short term memory capacity, basic facilities with dealing with language, and logical problem solving skills. And importantly from a clinical perspective you can see when these are mismatched. However these are very reductive variables, and in the real world there are many more things in interacting with each other than these isolated components.

For many, many years we could not explain why gravity exists and how it works. We could only experience it.

We knew of gravity much before we knew of electricity. Try explain electricity to somebody in year 1300 and you'd be burned as a witch.

And yet we understood electricity much earlier than gravity. How electricity works is much simpler to explain than gravity.

> “intelligence is whatever my test measures”

— Alfred Binet, inventor of the IQ test

We do know what it measures and we do know what impact it has on real life scenarios.

To some extent, yes. But I think it's better to emphasise the fact that we're ignorant rather than what we know because people really like abusing IQ test results.

What surprises me about Myers Briggs is that people are placed on each dimension either on one side or on the other. Three no center for each dimension. Yet these traits are normally distributed so most people would fall in the center. Telling most people they are average would not sell well. So yeah, this test is unnecessarily polarizing.

The traits aren't normally distributed. And the article mentions nearly every test treats them as axes.

I never thought about the lack of a neutral trait, but you are right.

However I don't think there's any reason to expect these traits to have a normal distribution. Humans have plenty of bimodal-ish traits.

The Central Limit Theorem is one big reason to expect that traits have a normal distribution. Wikipedia has a good explanation. [1] and [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Moivre–Laplace_theorem

Central limit theorem does not apply unless each experiment is independent. This is not true of the concepts which psychometrician operationally define including personality factors and intelligence.

As an example: Human height is not normally distributed. It is multi-modal based on geographical location, socioeconomic status and sex. There are genetic and environmental factors that makes it so that each childbirth is not an independent event marking a new height.

The same holds for personality traits (if they exists) and intelligence (if it exists as described by IQ tests). The field of psychometrics has a problem with assigning normal distribution to everything even though there is reason to belief things are not normally distributed.

How would the central limit theorem apply to seemingly bimodal distributions like left vs right handedness?

With respect to personality, I believe that there are likely a number of independent factors, perhaps hundreds, that affect in some way where one’s position lies on each of the axes of personality. These factors could be particular childhood traumas, birth order, parent’s behavior/addiction, childhood friends, and genetic factors. Even if each of these numerous random variable is binomial the central limit theorem applies.

This article [1] about what determines a persons handedness starts out:

> Like most aspects of human behavior, handedness is a complex trait that appears to be influenced by multiple factors, including genetics, environment, and chance.

It goes on to say that there are up to 40 genes that contribute. It seems like it's complex enough that the central limit theorem should apply yet handedness is definitely a bimodal distribution.

[1]: https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/understanding/traits/handed...

Handedness is not what people care about in discussing personality assessment.

Check out the big five model: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

Neuroticism, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion.

On each dimension, many people are average and a few are on each extreme. At least that's the world I've observed. It's not a world full of extreme introverts and extreme extroverts. Most people are in the middle of that scale.

Sort of the main point of the article, wouldn’t you agree?

At least that’s why I gathered it proposed a letter “x” for centered traits.

Do you have a link where Jung said his theories are wrong?

Agree, the test has been dismissed enough times. People are far too complex.

It has recently been renamed and represented by Jordan Peterson. Unfortunately, the JP readers I've met who mention his version were unaware of the MB version. The critical history of MB should serve as a warning. They are not eureka moments, but smaller steps.

>It has recently been renamed and represented by Jordan Peterson.

You've been downvoted because the OCEAN/Big Five model is not Myers Briggs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator

Ok. Thank you.

My reply would be...

By any other name.

Another way of how 'not' to understand the world, but a way to simplify it, for both benign and nefarious reasons. Control is in there somewhere. And it is more than mildly concerning that people here understand something that is considered deeply complicated by most, computers, and yet seem convinced humans can be pigeon-holed into a few 'types'.

I find it amazing that anyone uses it in the business world. Next up HR will be adding tarrot cards and oiji boards

Then again I find it amazing that anyone uses it at all. It's complete trash

Would you please stop posting shallow dismissals and calling names in HN comments? Posts like this and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26289644 are not what this site is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: we've had to ask you this sort of thing a ton of times. Eventually we ban such accounts. If you wouldn't mind reviewing the guidelines and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

"we've had to ask you this sort of thing a ton of times. Eventually we ban such accounts"

No you haven't. What's wrong with calling out bad products for what they are?

You replied to several of these at the time, but perhaps a refresher will be helpful:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23011040

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22280026

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17856086

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17447722

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17335152

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17181868

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16814032

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16261030

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16788897

The problem isn't "calling out bad products", though I wouldn't use the phrase "calling out", since the online callout/shaming culture is something we try to avoid here. Thoughtful critique is obviously welcome.

The problem is that you have a long history of breaking the site guidelines by posting flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments. If you can't or won't stop this, we will ban you, so please stop.

You'd get better response if you gave reasons for your statement. You may be right that this test is complete trash, I suspect many people here would agree.

The top comment on this thread says that Myers Briggs is complete trash

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26291262

The difference is they defend their assertion, and that post led to a very interesting discussion from both sides.

The article and the comments generally lead me to believe that there is correlation between MB and "Big 5", there is little from the tests that is actionable, but that's because of argued points one way or another, not be stating it's "complete trash"

Likewise, if you think rackspace is overpriced, or the customer service is lacking, perhaps some examples would get a better response. Why even post the statement if you aren't going to defend it? Is it to try to persuade people that rackspace is awful? You won't persuade anyone without a reason.

Something like "Rackspace is overpriced trash as they charge $500 for a 1U colo and my server had frequent outages, where BobRackInc charge $100 and has never had downtime" would, despite being an anecdote, at least open up the conversation.

The voodoo I’ve seen from HR departments makes MB look like Newtonian Physics.

Yet they are so bad at stats that you can’t even enter a discussion on if it passes any kind of empirical test.

It should not be surprising at all. How many companies have you worked at where part of your performance review involves dividing and averaging ordinal numbers?

If you give someone some sort of numeric rating in N categories you cannot mathematically (trivially) average these rating to get a meaningful score.

Ordinal numbers only allow you to say A is greater than B and B is greater than C therefore A is greater than C, but it says nothing about the distance between A and B, B and C and A and C.

Yet at countless companies compensation is determined by literally nonsensical mathematical operations.

Before the pedants get me, there are ways to transform ordinal numbers to do perform more complex mathematical operations on them, but I can assure you that your HR department does not do these.

So given HR's disregard for basic principles of mathematics it should not be surprising that they find the variety of personality tests worthwhile.

HR isn’t spending time on this ritual for performance reasons, but for risk management. It doesn’t serve your desired purpose, and the math would make no sense. Yet it perfectly satisfices what’s asked of them.

// https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing

Considering that some HR tests still include analyzing your handwriting by 'graphologists'.

Because human beings can be described in four bits.

Oh, four bits isn't enough? Four scales, then. That fixes it.

Your link doesn't work

It moved, and I can't change the link. I need dang to help. Here:

https://dynomight.home.blog/2020/06/12/in-defense-of-meyers-...

Changed now from https://dynomight.net/in-defense-of-myers-briggs.html.

VP wanted MB for team building for our division to assess our alignment and role effectiveness. [1] I mean who doesn't like free lunch and horoscopes? Well turns out it was like going to the shelter and hearing the bible sermon before the pay off in baloney sandwiches. Instead, the well paid consultant ate our baloney too. Questioning validity means you're of the SFTU type. At least she taught a great lesson: always convince the $uckers at the top.

[1] Golly extremely useful! https://jobtalk.indiana.edu/HRMWebsite/hrm/articles/develop/... https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-28315137

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