Why the Myers-Briggs test is meaningless | Hacker News Reader

Why the Myers-Briggs test is meaningless

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49 pointsfagnerbrack97 comments

More than meaningless I think MBTI is dangerous. It creates a false dichotomy between introvert and extrovert and then assigns you to one camp or the other. People then, especially those assigned introvert, limit themselves.

Introversion is not a diagnosis. You can be extroverted during meetings and introverted at your desk. If you 'lean introvert', it means you could work on exercising your extrovert muscle. It goes the same for the other way. Learning how to be introverted at the right time is a benefit to all extroverts.

The danger with MBTI is in making you think these are medical diagnoses and you're trapped being one thing or the other. I've worked with people who think they are extroverts and read books like "How To Work With Introverts." These people are dangerous. So are employers that want to know your type. They will limit your career growth depending on their prejudices. This is no different than you career suffering because you aren't a Pisces.

As far as personality tests go it's less dangerous/"offensive" than a lot of others.

E.g what if an employee was classified as low agreeableness, high neuroticism, low conscientiousness, etc etc? Liability issues abound if that was used for hiring/promotion purposes. That's not even getting into IQ...

Although it is true that personalities are not dichotomies, the best (reproducible and meaningful) personality inventory to date is the big 5. Extraversion is one of the inventories. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

Research has suggested that the brains of people identified with higher or lesser degrees of extraversion do function differently.

You are correct that behavior does not derive deterministically from personality. Anecdotally, I agree that MTBI has been used as an excuse to refrain from developing beneficial social skills and behaviors.

> Research has suggested that the brains of people identified with higher or lesser degrees of extraversion do function differently.

This is an extremely weak statement. You can find any difference in the brain if you look hard enough. The brain is an extremely dynamic system and our measurements are full of noise. And even you are able to fully account for the noise in measurements you can easily be measuring something different than you think you are.

> You are correct that behavior does not derive deterministically from personality.

This should be a failing grade of personality psychology. What is the point of measuring personality if you cant find any behavior associated with it? At this point personality psychology is nothing more than metaphysics and has no place in modern science.

Most of these visual / abbreviations “theories” are utter bs, packages as truth. And they’re very hard to get rid of.

Not 100% bs, but exactly the same as a lot of “best practices” in tech. They’re there for the IP holders of the brand they create with it.

Sell a catchy concept/name, license out the name, verification which experts every 2 years, or certified training courses, charge more for that. Etc

Big 5 names are made up, call them whatever you want, but the categories those names are put in are not made up. They're result of Factor Analysis in all personality questions to date which comes in different levels of resolution. They only put names in the top 5 resolution to make sense out of it, but you can have 1000, 1000000 categories at which point there's one category per question and the whole exercise stops being useful, so we have to reach a certain level of grouping that becomes applicable in real-life. The widely agreed is 5 factors and 10 aspects per factor.

Introvert = Negative emotions. Extrovert = Positive emotions. Negative & Positive as in batteries, not if it's good or bad.

I have done the real Myers-Briggs process a few times. It takes a day for a small team, and includes several interviews, the test, and meetings. The test on its own is pretty pseudoscientific (and gameable), but if you know someone well you can usually guess their MBTI type without a test. However, the whole process is not a bad medium for introspecting on whether your process works for the individuals on the team, using the "scientific personality profiles" you just developed to talk about your style.

For example, one team I was on adopted a meeting agenda before our weekly meetings (the Amazon "6-pager" idea), ostensibly because of the prevalence of IxxJ personality types on the team, and it helped several people become more open.

As I understand it, there are now better personality inventories and processes for this, but Myers-Briggs was the OG.

The idea that you know something is nonsense, but you make some excuse in your mind for how it is useful nonetheless is such a common, human thing. You see the same "logic" with lie detector tests. "Oh we know it is useless but its still useful because of nonsense games we play with it"

Just stop, accept that it is bogus and don't do it.

I'm not saying it's useless at all. I'm saying that the online bullshit that everyone thinks when you talk about "the MBTI" is useless. The actual MBTI is useful when used in its intended context, and no more. When people take the test out of context, it becomes no more than a horoscope.

For most personality inventories, that context is in terms of determining what makes people comfortable in interpersonal relations. It doesn't predict the kinds of jobs you like (even though people online say it does). It doesn't predict your income earnings potential. It doesn't predict how you will act in any given circumstance. It doesn't predict how you will feel in any given circumstance. Its only value is in helping to determine what kinds of interactions you are most comfortable with.

This is the same as other psychology tests, like those online autism, ADD, or psychopathy tests that people are also obsessed with. The paper test literally means nothing on its own. It is used to follow up on a clinical observation.

Also, by the way, the Myers-Briggs test itself has had a hard time standing up to scrutiny because the test is very transparent about what it's testing for, so any test-taker can manipulate their answers to get the result they want very easily. Modern personality tests are usually some variant of the "big five" (which is kind of like Myers-Briggs plus one). The tests have gotten better at not convincing you to manipulate the result.

A lot of people who are engineers are uncomfortable with this kind of arrangement, but it's how a lot of psychology (and medicine, for that matter) works due to the uncertainty in the testing vehicles, which is substantial.

What do you believe is the intended purpose of the actual MBTI? It is my understanding that it has its roots in Jungian psychoanalysis, which is thoroughly debunked pseudoscience at this point. The only utility of Jungian psychoanalysis today is in media and literature, particularly in Hollywood movies (and even then it is a bit outdated).

I am aware that the MBTI has outlived Jungian psychoanalysis so we should assess it on its own merits (and not by its intended context) and as such it is at best useless fun (like the horoscope, online autism test, etc[1]) but at worst an industry based around provably false benefits.

On its own merits MBTI is no different from modern personality tests in its lack of utility. It only set is self apart by being exceptionally poor at it, and explicitly basing it self on non-sensical statistical methods. Modern personality tests use cromulent statistics but fail to demonstrate any merit outside of which personality they’ve “discovered”. In other words, they’ve “discovered” epicycle and use that to describe planetary motions, all the while cognitive psychologists, behavior psychologists, neuro-pshychologists, sociologists, etc. have discovered general relativity and are using that to describe the same phenomena.

1: Although online autism tests often serve as a first step for autistic adults to go and get an actual diagnostic, or even just self-diagnose, and become a part of the autistic or neuro-diversity community which often has quite positive effects on their lives (if only by educating and being around other people in the community). I fail to see how MBTI has even this tiny foot-in-the-door benefit.

The intended purpose is to serve as a discussion point for how to best interact with you. Same with the other big 5 tests. It turns out people are not good at articulating that absent a weird context like a personality testing process.

The typical use of big 5 and MBTI is to help teams work together and understand each others' working styles. That's it. The Jungean crap is just crap. Like literally everything else in psychology, it's a discussion point that gets the conversation started. So is Big 5. So is CBT (arguably the most "evidence-based" form of psychology, which still turns out to be scientifically debatable).

It turns out that psychology is just about having structured conversations about your feelings. Personality tests are a framework for that, and they work for that purpose (and basically that purpose alone).

Think about it this way. You can find new methods to measure fluid imbalance in your body. Or you can create better statistical models to more accurately assess the weigh each planetary body has on you horoscope, or you pinpoint which negative ions has positive health benefits. It doesn’t mean anything about whether or not these effects are real, just that you measured your non-effects more accurately.

Personality psychology is there. They have been creating better measurements for over 50 years now, but they are still failing to demonstrate that personality effects in the real world are nothing more then something they believe exists.

I'm not making the claim that MBTI is useful, but anecdotally people who are familiar with it seem to be able to guess close acquaintances' types with above chance accuracy. Leads me to suspect that it's getting at something, although perhaps in a coarse or low utility way. I've never seen someone guess horoscope signs above chance.

From my understanding of it and having to take it a couple times at different jobs, it seems like a reasonably coherent categorization system for certain aspects of personality.

Where it falls apart is making predictions about how individuals will react to a certain situation or how people will interact with each other. In that I've never seen it do better than just what a socially competent person would accomplish by going with their judgement and intuition, and often worse.

I think it’s not actually testing personality, but some kind of way that people choose to present themselves. The difference is that personality is supposed to be more stable over time and across different circumstances.

http://www.socionics.com/rel/rel.htm

This is a link that describes how people will relate with each other, and I’ve found it to be accurate. Note the type encoding system is slightly different from MBTI, for introverts the last letter has to be flipped.

I want to point out that MBTI is basically a brochure version of an underlying theory. The value comes from understanding the individual cognitive functions themselves. Once you understand that, you can know the _process_ someone uses to think and make decisions. That gives you a better idea of why they think the way they do, especially if their cfs are different / confusing to you. It’s like being able to boot up someone else’s mental… OS in a VM (taxing and slow, but if you really want to run something, necessary.)

I did it three times and ended up with three different types. My "personality" as measured by the test is more of product of environment, who is around me and how I adjust to it rather then something inherent to me.

Also, the questions (at least on last test) thinking/feeling scale seemed to measure values rather then actual personality.

If your “personality” is a product of environment then it’s not really personality, is it? The notion of “personality” that personality tests are supposed to get at is not dependent on environment, or at least, that is the way that personality is defined in this context.

Yep. That is my point. It is not measuring something that would be inherent to me.

Personality varying with context is a well accepted concept. Most of these kinds of tests acknowledge it.

Mine told me I had the same personality type as Optimus Prime and nobody's taking that away from me.

That's why it's stuck around so long—it tells EVERYONE that they have the same personality type as Optimus Prime, so nobody wants to dump it.

Not everybody, just your ENFJ types. :-)

Honestly, I was at a company who got everybody to do the personality tests and then had a marriage counselor sit down with every team to discuss the results. The goal was to help people try to relate to each other more effectively.

It was honestly a decent exercise. I learned that I was one of 3 extroverted programmers at the company (of 150 devs). I don't know that it had much of a lasting impact, but it was solid effort on the part of that company.

The only reason I know the Optimus Prime thing is that they asked us to find a famous figure with a matching personality type to include on our team's internal wiki page.

Anecdotally people who believe horoscopes say they can guess above average. Now, if you can do it in a controlled setting, that's more meaningful.

There could be something to the horoscope thing. Someone born in winter will have slightly different initial conditions than someone born in summer. Seasonal variations could affect early years.

That's not even getting into how month-of-birth could affect how a child fits into the school system. Some months will be on average older than their classmates, some younger.

I think the second effect is probably stronger in the modern (air-conditioned, artificially-lit, state-schooled) era.

Well.. there could be. But there doesn't seem to be. People can't hit the horoscope sign even roughly. They can't do it better than change for all of the year.

Funnily enough, looking into it, there are apparently some measurable differences between winter and summer births.

From the abstract: "Winter/spring birth, while associated with an increased risk of schizophrenia, is generally associated with superior outcomes with respect to physical and cognitive development."

Source: Schizophrenia Research 81 (2006) 91–100. "Season of birth is associated with anthropometric and neurocognitive outcomes during infancy and childhood in a general population birth cohort". https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3743679/sdarticl...

Not a statistician, but just because the results of the test are predictable, I’m not sure the test is useful. Meaningful tests/models have predictive power. Is Meyers Briggs capable of predicting anything? (Repeatedly and reliably)

It's not even an issue of statistics - yes the traits might exist, and people might fit into it, but that doesn't mean it's predictive of any outcome related metric.

If it's stable over time, surely that allows some predictions to be made.

Eh, if my boss listens to the description of my type and approaches dealing with me with that in mind I’m pretty much guaranteed to be happier.

Well yeah, it's not difficult to know if someone is introverted or extraverted is it? Would you be impressed with a test that determined your gender, retirement status and race?

The test might ask such insightful questions as "are you over 65?" and "are both of your parents white?". Then it would use complex algorithms to determine that you are a white retiree.

> perhaps in a coarse or low utility way.

I think this is right, and a lot of the "this is astrology" people seem to be conflating the fact that something can be useful (which, to be clear, I don't believe astrology is) with the fact that something can be misused.

> I've never seen someone guess horoscope signs above chance.

I've met one person who was David-Blaine-party-trick-level good at this. Out of ~20 people she never met (including me) I think she missed one person's water/earth/fire/air sign, and was probably >80% on guessing their month sign, it was very entertaining.

Is there even such a thing as "your type" if as the article states 50% of people get a different result the second time they take the test?

A suggestion is people project themselves as what they want, and not what they are - and answer that way. Self reporting & self contextualization of meaning of the questions could be considered low accuracy.

I've never understood people outside of a work context. They're just balls of emotion that to me appear to do illogical things for random reasons. In an effort to understand, about 10 years back I dove heavily into the traits of the individual "letters" and the types from MBTI.

Even if it isn't perfect, it is a framework for me to arrive at a consistent typing systems for anyone. I can now accurately predict people, what they'll do in most circumstances, and then their likes/dislikes. 16 buckets gives you a small group of permutations to start with - and then to whittle a person into for refinement.

The fallacy is to approach the test as an absolute, rather than for proclivities. Each person of a "type" will still have unique differences. Humans really aren't that unique, bell curve and all.... x of 100 groupings helped me understand that.

> Even if it isn't perfect, it is a framework for me to arrive at a consistent typing systems for anyone.

I had the same exact experience.

> Even if it isn't perfect, it is a framework for me to arrive at a consistent typing systems for anyone

It's almost like all models are wrong, but some are useful.

If you use starsigns and the current alignment of the planets you will get similar results.

Star signs are the belief that you have a label which causes you have traits.

A personality framework assigns you a label based on the traits you have.

They’re basically the opposite of each other.

What a great way to say it!

For me, the label is just as arbitrary. I've taken the (self reported) test about 3 different times throughout my life and gotten 3 different results.

I agree with the other comment that assigning a binary classification to a unimodal distribution is pretty much worthless.

It doesn't really matter if your model claims A->B or B->A and what makes more sense to you, if you don't provide any supporting data that shows that your model actually can predict reality.

A personality framework is a descriptor of reality. Not a predictor. Your comment is nonsensical.

What’s wrong with star signs? It can be easily explained:

- people born after the start of the school year are a lot older when they go to school. That skews this a lot. You’re larger, stronger, more developed. That gives you a huge advantage. 6 months at that point is 10% of your life, maybe even more

People born during the winter (I think) have more exposure to sunlight after the first few months of being inside/protected.

With just these two influences you can explain quite some traits of star signs

They are very poor predictors of things. Those factors are not significant effects on personality.

Wholly disagree. 1/12 of the population born during a period having the same behaviors is easily testable in one's personal life and can reveal the lunacy. Example: 140M people born globally a year, so all 140/12M would be "X".

MBTI says a person with "S" sensing abilities has these traits (x,y,z). No predictions, but observations of one's tendencies.

I think most people do this by instinct, and have self-made buckets for people. It's really error-prone and not very accurate, and ends up leading to a lot of prejudice.

And then they write articles claiming that things like the MBTI are useless because their self-made buckets are perfectly fine most of the time.

And I'm a self-made bucket kind of person. I didn't get from the MBTI what you did, but I can at least see how it could be useful for some people. (Or maybe even all people, if they took the time to really understand it like you have.)

> I think most people do this by instinct, and have self-made buckets for people. It's really error-prone and not very accurate, and ends up leading to a lot of prejudice.

I agree with you. I noticed I held myself and others to a very high standard, and could not understand why (to me) their irrational decisions didn't let them meet my standards. Studying MBTI for me, helped give me some rational way to understand the proclivities and possible thinking of another to help me understand how people have different strengths/weaknesses and life journies.

Each person of a "type" will still have unique differences

The biggest problem with it is that there’s no validity to these “types”. Taking a unimodal normal distribution and just calling everyone below the mode one type and everyone above the mode another type, is not only completely arbitrary but just plain wrong from a statistical perspective. That is, it won’t yield predictions with any accuracy.

In order to show that there actually are real types they need to show a bimodal (or multimodal) distribution. As far as I’m aware, no one has done that.

I think it is actually worse. I don’t know about Myers Briggs, but other personality tests actually adjust and standardize their metrics in order to find a bell curve. They believe there is something pristine or divine about the normal distribution, and if you find it you have found a holy truth. If you find something else, you should adjust your metrics until you do.

The usefulness of typologies like MB lies entirely in opening one's eyes to the ways that people can be different without necessarily being "better" or "worse", which is good because it helps us to understand differences (including our own) without being judgemental about them.

But in terms of predicting people's behavior or abilities, MB is more harmful than useful, as TFA said, and it should really be seen only as a very limited tool for self-knowledge and personal growth. Btw., I think in that regard the (just as unscientific) enneagram is a much better tool. It also mostly dispenses with the idea that you can "type" others... the enneagram is strictly for self-discovery.

As the article says, Psychology now has some meassures of personality that are actually widely agreed on by researchers and which have some validated predictive power. There is the 5-factor model and also the 3 "dark traits". For more about the former I can recommend Daniel Nettle's book "Personality: What makes you the way you are".

I believe a framework gives you consistency and can be used to predict or understand the weighted probability of a human's decisions.

We want to believe we are all unique individuals. To the Nth DNA strand, we are & to our localized "social circle", we are. But in groups of 100, we are not. Society and individuals group themselves to a set of dominant behaviors & social norms - those are what MBTI looks to group.

The four axes of the myers-briggs test are strongly correlated with four axes of the big five test. This presents a serious challenge for anyone who (like this article) claims the myers-briggs test is meaningless while the big five is not meaningless. (I wrote a post making this argument at greater length: https://dynomight.net/in-defense-of-myers-briggs.html )

Thanks for linking your post.

I absolutely despise these "personality" tests. I've done the DISC assessment bs at multiple jobs. I'm to the point where I think I'm going to purposely answer "wrong" in the future to get some odd letter and throw the hardcore DISC fans off.

We have a few people that continuously walk around talking about whether they're D, or "oh that's such an S thing to do". Yes... all people's personalities fit into some stupid 4 personality acronym.

>We have a few people that continuously walk around talking about whether they're D, or "oh that's such an S thing to do". Yes... all people's personalities fit into some stupid 4 personality acronym.

It seems like it's only a stone's throw away from astrology.

> It seems like it's only a stone's throw away from astrology.

That is such a Taurus thing to say.

25 years ago, a friend quickly learned how to answer an online MBTI so that he could consistently score neutral on all four axes. I think that was the most entertaining approach that I've seen.

Currently our HR Director has plans to start using this shit in our company under the cover of "teambuilding events" - anyone has some experiences on how to change her mind? I really don't want to put people into boxes, even worse with arbitrary/wrong labels, and I can't stand pseudoscience any longer (it starts slowly with this crap and ends up with chemtrails or worse)

I thought it was incredibly enlightening to do this with my team.

“What? I was sure you were an extrovert based on how you act!”

“Unfortunately I detest talking to you all, it’s just the only way to get anything done.”

MBTI is pretty much like astrology/horoscope

Also it's funny how if you see someone on Twitter or on dating site putting it up on their profile it's like 90% of a time is an INTP/J

I think there is some irony in claiming a certain behavior seems to be distinct to one personality archetype as evidence that the personality framework is meaningless.

Had a job that wanted me to do a PROCTORED Myers Briggs test as part of the interview process. In addition to a IQ test.

Thanked them for their time and moved on...

My recruiter didn't understand why I was running for the door.

"Oh Agent Starling, you think you can dissect me with this blunt little tool?"

Look, I think they're useful as a general idea, though I'd never use them to tell me anything concrete, even with the caveat that all people in the situation are acting honestly.

I'm just most interested in the companies who require the tests as part of their onboarding. If me taking the test is a prerequisite for me working there, what does that say about your organization?

Why wouldn't a company want to have a better understanding of who they are hiring? A manager can use them to shape the role, shape the goals, and approach people differently.

Example: If you are a xxTJ "thinker judger" I know that you'll be upfront, may use coarse wording, cut to the chase, and may bulldoze people (I am xNTJ). An "xxFP" "Feeler Perceiver" will internalize words and apply emotional meaning, empathize with people easily & understand people, but be put off by "in your face" types.

MBTI is useful. It's a shortcut to seeing your own blind spots and typing people will likely improve the quality of your interactions (it has for me). I married the exact opposite of my personality and raise two kids that mirror us. I also type people when I first meet them. Some learnings:

  1. Seeing MBTI as limiting is itself a limitation. People bring value in different ways and knowing where to look for it can be life changing.
  2. Personality is genetic but can vary wildly. MBTI is best seen as a genotype (markers for traits, rather than the expression of traits). Some of its categories aren't very helpful while others can help guide a career.
  3. MBTI is more of an ongoing study rather than a test you take. Once developed, it provides a helpful guide to communicating, understanding expectations and compatibility with others. It’s also a helpful mirror to see your own blind spots.
  4. Mature individuals can be difficult to type as they present as they choose rather than their defaults.

This reminds me of the "CliftonStrengths" assessment, which I've been trying to get more information on. It's doing the rounds in the indie publishing community right now and people get so excited about how they're "high strategic" or "low intuitive" or whatever, you just hear it everywhere. There's authors buying books, courses, coaching, etc. I _thought_ all of this stuff was disproved a long time ago, but I still haven't figured out if this "Clifton" one is somehow different or if it's just authors falling for people charging a bunch of money to train them on their "strengths" as if they mean anything.

I suppose even if they _don't_ mean anything, if they help the person introspect and figure out what works for them it's worth it in some way. It just really grinds my gears to see these "consultants" or "coaches" talk about this stuff as if it is totally evidence-based and backed by science. Unless maybe Clifton is different somehow?

Meaningless is pretty subjective here, plenty of us derive joy from such things.

When I see any "test" that puts people in generic buckets I think of the quote from Robert Benchley (I didn't know the source, just the quote and he seems to be the originator in 1920):

"There may be said to be two classes of people in the world; those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes, and those who do not."

But people aren't unique. Their dominant behaviors and dominant social shaping are a distribution. Call it 5 buckets, call it 16 buckets or whatever - but people really aren't that unique on the whole.

Personality tests are just another way to discriminate. They have absolutely no basis in fact in predicting how a person is going to behave or perform in a given situation.

Corporations, and society in general, put far too much faith in trying to read the tea leaves of human cognition and behavior through shortcuts.

It’s neither meaningless nor dangerous. I’ve been part of a community that has found this helpful for decades.

But a key factor with us is that we use it as a preference indicator, not a reality indicator. It has heuristic value as a way of talking about universal human experiences.

I want to be thought of as an ENFP, so that’s what I call myself, even though the test thinks I am INFP. The test is not important. But the letters are shorthand for a set of policies by which my behavior can be made sense of.

Maybe there is a better way. But, no, it’s not meaningless.

It is meaningless as a science, and meaningless as a utility. It’s only remaining function is entertainment. Or as OP puts it:

> The Myers-Briggs is useful for one thing: entertainment. There's absolutely nothing wrong with taking the test as a fun, interesting activity, like a BuzzFeed quiz.

However the industry brands it self as a utility based on science, when it is in fact neither. And I take issue with that. At best this is really really expensive entertainment exploited by big business, selling a product based on a lie.

Myers-Briggs is astrology. If you find that sort of thing fun, then great.

Run away from any company demanding you take such a test as part of their interviewing process. It's as useful to the company as informing them of your astrological sign. Outside of entertainment it serves no purpose and using it outside of entertainment is detrimental to all involved. Any company using Myers-Briggs to evaluate their employees or future employees is likely to be using other snake oil methodologies as well and is best to be avoided.

The writer of this article seems to have a pretty big beef with Myers-Briggs.

It’s fine. As long as you realize that it’s not binary, and indicates a tendency, not an absolute.

I think understanding personality types is pretty useful, actually. The trouble arises when people don't acknowledge the traits are on a continuum and could change over time. So the letter classification can be misleading. For these to be predictive, I thing they are useful but must be joined with other variables. Air temperature is not meaningless when predicting the weather, but it is not sufficient either.

I think people project more onto it than is generally purported. The only thing MBTI does is reflect preferences, at least preferences people think they have. Anything else explored by the "assessments" like Ti/Fe is bullshit. The test is more redundant than it is meaningless, except to those for whom concepts like being detail-oriented or regimented or introverted are novel.

This article sounds like just another way to own the cons.. it isn't that what American politics comes down to nowadays.. owning the cons and owning the libs. That's all politics is these days and it has spread out into every possible area of American life including science. Got to own the cons... got to own the libs... Isn't America great?

I find the N types enjoy and find value in MBTI. S types seem to hate it because it's not scientific enough. As an N type I find the big five worthless for helping me understand interactions with others. MBTI wasn't made to be a correlate in your study; I guess it's meaningless.

> S types seem to hate it because it's not scientific enough.

N types can make the leap. S types (of the many I've known) believe they're intuitive until actually experiencing they may not be, or are too data focused to allow an intuitive leap to be made. And that bothers S more than N.

Every ESTJ / ISTJ wants to be an INTJ.

I'm not a fan of it and I definitely hate its popularity in companies, where it truly has no valid use imo.

But people do seem to find it useful as a tool for personal introspection, making it similar to tarot, astrology, i ching, etc. Meaningless maybe but not worthless per se.

I think the difference is that tarots and astrology are mainly used recreationaly while personal psychology is used more by professionals claiming benefits then by the general public just having fun. Horoscope authors are more like folk preachers or entertainers than scientists, personality psychologists are still mascaraing as scientists.

While plenty of people are being scammed using astrology, way more people are just spending little to no money just having fun. Personality psychology is overwhelmingly businessmen selling snake oil.

Yes good point.

Can't remember where I read it, but I enjoyed this remark on MBTI: "be skeptical of any personnel categorisation system where everyone is a winner". MBTI is just another exercise in extracting money from the gullible.

Every time I do this test I get about 50% on three of the four categories, and the random noise in my precise answers means I get a different "personality type" every time.

I’m fascinated by people who work so hard to fight Myers-Briggs. It’s like the observation that atheists take religion too seriously. How is Myers Briggs important enough to attack?

Believing that someone can judge your thoughts invokes a strong feeling of revulsion in some people. It's also generally bad news for society.

Haven't someone already tried to give MBTI to GPT? Ideally repeatedly to do some reliability statistics? :D

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