Hacker News Reader

Comment by ricardo81 | Hacker News Reader

Love biology. I appreciate purist mathematician/logicians prefer chemistry and physics and it seems to be an inside joke in the professions that biology isn't on the same level when it comes to axiomatic things.

I'm a classic INTJ but left school and built biology-online.org 25ish years ago. I think it's had a couple of thousand years of reading hours. I sold it on thinking I lack the expertise the topic deserves (it ranked well on Google for lots of biological terms)

I love the lack of agency about biology/evolution, it found a way to create ourselves as well as the huge tree of life around us purely through biological/ecological pressures. And here we are. We owe a lot to how biology has expressed things over the past 4 billion years and will likely find out a whole lot more.

View on HN

> I'm a classic INTJ

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

> Despite its popularity, the MBTI has been widely regarded as pseudoscience by the scientific community.[1][3][2] The validity (statistical validity and test validity) of the MBTI as a psychometric instrument has been the subject of much criticism.

> Many of the studies that endorse MBTI are methodologically weak or unscientific.[13] A 1996 review by Gardner and Martinko concluded: "It is clear that efforts to detect simplistic linkages between type preferences and managerial effectiveness have been disappointing. Indeed, given the mixed quality of research and the inconsistent findings, no definitive conclusion regarding these relationships can be drawn."[13][72]

>The test has been likened to horoscopes, as both rely on the Barnum effect, flattery, and confirmation bias, leading participants to personally identify with descriptions that are somewhat desirable, vague, and widely applicable.[10][73] MBTI is not recommended in counseling.[74]

I don't mind the pigeon hole classification as it seems to describe me quite well vs the other definitions.

Any survey (as opposed to horoscopes which aren't up to user choice) can be used to convey information about a person, even if that information is what they think about themselves. "I took a survey and I'm a Slytherin" conveys plenty, and no one feels the need to point out that that's unscientific.

I get that, but I wanted to elucidate since many people think Myers Briggs is based on data and is not a fiction.

So is it a coincidence that a majority of programmers tend to fall into the INTJ bracket?

The criticisms shared by GP are that MBTI is unscientific; ie: unclear or hard to disprove.

There’s a funny irony that you’re using a rhetorical device, as opposed to a rigorous scientific methodology, to try and navigate that criticism.

I don't see how, or at least that much. Language is merely a construct to describe things.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com