The Big Five and HEXACO models have proven pretty statistically reliable. But yeah, most any predecessors to those were complete ass pulls, often by people not really versed in the field (like Myers and Briggs).
Boy is that a dismissive overstatement. Briggs began thinking about personality in 1917, intentionally read biographies to get more data on personalty, and incorporated Jung's ideas in 1923 when his book was published, albeit with her own interpretation. Meyers did an apprenticeship with a test developer to learn how to make tests. So both Meyers and Briggs were, in fact, reasonably well versed in the field. They did not even make the test until 1944, after they'd been thinking about these ideas for over 20 years. Note that the Big 5 was not developed until the 1980s, almost half a century after they developed their theory. Ass-pulling this is not.
Wikipedia hates on the MBTI, but the actual test that you have to pay for is hardly "Barnum effect, flattery, and confirmation bias": you have 50 or so questions that you have to choose between two options of what you do. Now, you do have to answer what you actually would do rather than what you think is best or what you should do or what you should do culturally, so there is some confounding effects there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi...
Folks with Autism often have traits of being: direct, seek deep details, are able to stick with a few topics to deep excellence, can sometimes struggle reading people’s emotions.
And yes while generalisations, I wonder on how different neurodivergence’s may be hiding in plain sight within some of these personality systems.
I’ve def seen jokes online that notice that certain MBTI profiles are commonly gateway diagnosis for say ADHD/Autism.
Interested in others thoughts and takes on this.
Someday psychology might be a science but it isn't now; it just rejected its alchemical mystics like it saw the cool sciences doing, but without any paradigm to follow them.
The findings of psychology tend to be unreplicable just-so stories, like all the findings so popular in pop-psychology books that failed to replicate in the 2010s, or journal-filling tautologies, like "Big 5" papers showing introversion correlates with introversion or what have you.
Alchemy reformed into chemistry. You can make real sciences out of mysticism. Psychology is not a real science reformed out of mysticism, it's just academic bureaucracy set up like the ones associated with real sciences, producing useless papers.
Please don't enact your personal psychodrama on random people on the Internet, or at least don't do it to me.
I wouldn't dream of competing with you.
Suppose I make a test and ask questions like "Do you like coffee?" and "Is your favorite color blue?". That would get a very high test-retest reliability. If I then score e.g. +coffee -blue as "intelligent", does that really mean people who like coffee but prefer orange are intelligent?
Let's just say that if astrology was reliable, people would follow their horoscopes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi...
Which is quite a shame because the underlying groundwork of Jung is quite interesting.