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Comment by ShockedUnicorn | Hacker News Reader

As a swede. This is the first time I've seen this 4 colour system. I'm 30, so maybe it's more popular around younger people?

I have seen things like "INTP-J" on friends profile. I think it's called 16 personalities.

Me and my colleagues did that test, and the suggested one for me did not fit in with me at all, and most of us thought the results were bullshit. Why anyone would follow this to make work groups, or to exclude people in their life is mind boggling.

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Myers-Briggs is mostly [1] pseudo-scientific BS. And the results may not even be very stable from one test-taking to the next.

[1] Mostly. MB and more recent variants can be useful for reinforcing that different people have different worldviews and tendencies. There's also some evidence that different groups, such as different professions (like programmers), do tend to test differently as a population and that has certain implications when they're creating products for a different population (like the general public) that tends to test differently.

> There's also some evidence that different groups, such as different professions (such as programmers), do tend to test differently as a population

Doesn’t that imply it isn’t all bullshit?

Hence "mostly." But if you look at the full Myers-Briggs summary, it slots people into one of 16 categories and then has a nice little writeup describing people in that category. Which is a long way past acknowledging that some people are more comfortable dealing with abstract mental models than others or that some people want to deal with facts over emotions.

The actual science, such as it is, is also rooted into Jungian psychology which doesn't really have a lot of actual science behind it.

The INTP thing is MBTI type, and although it's widely derided, it's pretty strongly correlated with the much more respectable Big Five personality traits[0]. It's not 100% bullshit, since knowing it tells you a little bit about how someone will act.

I do agree that cutting someone out of your life solely due to a personality test is putting the cart before the horse, regardless of how scientifically rigorous it is.

[0] https://dynomight.net/in-defense-of-myers-briggs.html

Nope, still bullshit. It's not science to make up a bunch of stuff and look for confirmation after. (Hence there are no "in defense of" articles.)

Whether it's bullshit depends on what you mean by bullshit, and I think it's less useful to argue about ambiguous definitions than to more clearly state a position. Knowing MBTI lets you make guesses about someone's personality that are a lot better than chance, as opposed to knowing their star sign or blood type.

> it's pretty strongly correlated with the much more respectable Big Five personality traits

Well, two of the MBTI types have a strong correlation (defined typically as >0.5, in the MBTI case around 0.7 in both cases, IIRC) with two of the Big 5 traits. But that’s...not so great a reason to lean on MBTI.

It was the best selling pocket book in Sweden in 2017 and 2018. 800 000 copies have been sold in Swedish. It was pretty difficult to miss.

That’s under 8% of the population buying the book or receiving it as a gift and some percentage of them reading it.

You say "under 8% of the population" having a copy of the book as if that doesn't make it almost as popular as the Bible.

There’s been roughly 1 copy of the Bible printed per person alive on the earth. Not all of them are still around, but it’s likely there is still at least 1 copy per 2 people.

A better comparison would be against Bible sales during 2017-2018.

According to Statista, 85% of Swedes self-identify as either "non-practicing Christians" or "religiously unaffiliated", unlikely they have a bible at home if that's accurate. "Church-attending Christians" come up as 8%, and are likely to have a bible at home. "almost as popular as the Bible" seems, if Statista is right, very likely.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/909409/religious-identif...

8% of a population doing any singular thing is rather significant.

For instance: in the 90's less than 10% (but more than 5%) of British people were going to university. But that has profound effects on the population.

Going to the university at any one moment. 1/4th of the UK workforce has a collage degree.

Aka more than 25% of 18-20 year where in collage in the UK.

8% of a population owning a book is friggin huge, don't try to portray it as not.

Is not that INTP thing Myers-Briggs that is mentioned in the article?

It is. Myers-Briggs has four axes: I/E, N/S, T/F, P/J.

There's also a whole sub-layer of dominant and auxiliary functions.

Yes, it is.

It was popular for the younger adult crowd and women. If your a middle-aged IT male person, you probably miss a lot of popular trends.

Missing fads is a feature, not a bug.

I think Vetenskap och Folkbildning (authors of the linked text) have a website with some longer articles and more details. If I remember correctly there were a few public services (police? hospital?) that paid a lot of money to the author of the book for private courses.

I think that the book is a typical case of "You have a complex problem and my snake oil provides an easy solution"

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