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Comment by Insanity | Hacker News Reader

At some point I got curious about how close ChatGPT would get to my Myers-Briggs profile based on my chats over the past year.

It accurately got my type.. could be a coincidence of course, but I thought it was quite interesting. It also provided supporting evidence from the many types of different conversations we have had.

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Likely coincidence. Myers-Briggs has no scientific validity and is the corporate equivalent of horoscopes in the newspaper. [1]

When someone asks for your Myers-Briggs type, give them a zodiac sign. When someone asks for your zodiac sign, give them a Myers-Briggs type. ;)

[1]: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/myers-briggs-psychology...

No one has any idea what the types mean other than introvert/extrovert, and it's increasingly clear that even that split is highly dependent on a bunch of contextual stuff— someone who is gregarious and outgoing in one setting may be overwhelmed and need space to themselves in another. And moreover, none of it hard-coded; being "extroverted" is largely a matter of feeling comfortable wielding a set of social skills that are very much learnable— how to read the room, tell a funny story, ask questions that are curious without being invasive, volunteer information about yourself that invites engagement without oversharing, etc.

This stuff is no different that learning public speaking, or partner dance, or how to play ultimate frisbee. You can watch it done well, you can give yourself opportunities to practice, you can even take classes or get 1:1 coaching. And it's also fine to choose not to do those things if your passions are elsewhere, but it's important that growth-mindset people understand that "introvert" is something you choose, not a genetic inevitability.

Myers-Briggs is pattern recognition that gives a surface-level measurement of 4 traits. The weakness of the test is not that it cannot produce an answer, it is that the answer is useless. It changes day-to-day as people change day-to-day and it over-simplifies people across 4 traits. But ChatGPT can work from a static history of chats, avoiding change (assuming you are just asking once). And it excels at such surface-level categorization of content.

So even if MBTI is useless, the ability of ChatGPT to offer an equally useless answer of your type is not at all surprising.

Myers-Briggs is nearly astrology, but the tests are remarkably consistent because they basically poll your philosophy and self-image, and that changes slowly over your life (even if your view of yourself and other people is inaccurate, it's likely to stay inaccurate.)

As a data point, I learned about Myers-Briggs on the internet just like everyone else, and took tests on the internet for fun just like everyone else. Mentioned it to my dad during a casual conversation and asked him to guess what this stupid "online personality test" said about me, and he replied with my exact type. Turns out he had given it to me when I was around 10 years old (he was obsessed with metrics*), and 25 years later it was still the same (and not a common type.)

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[*] Fun fact: Allstate Insurance got their HR and training infiltrated by a Scientology consultancy, and they brought Hubbard's obsession with forcing cult members to produce more income for him to the organization for years before they were forced out. They accidentally turned my father who was transitioning from programming into HR into a completely unaware Scientologist when it came to demanding performance (which also gave him dumb ideas about child-rearing.)

Allstate Admits Training Was ‘Unacceptable’ : Insurance: Company hired consultant who taught Scientology management principles between 1988 and 1992.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-03-23-fi-46309-...

https://www.lermanet.com/scientologynews/allstate2.html

> Myers-Briggs has no scientific validity

Is this an accuracy versus precision problem?

In my anecdotal experience, most people will consistently test near one’s Myers-Briggs type on different tests. It’s just that this test doesn’t translate well to the real-world situations it was pitched for.

> test near one’s Myers-Briggs type

He's saying that Myers-Briggs has no scientific basis. So if there's another test that does, you wouldn't be able to compare those results anyway.

> He's saying that Myers-Briggs has no scientific basis

Favourite-colour based personality theories have no scientific basis. It would still be interesting if an LLM could guess my favourite colour.

That's a different point than what I'm making.

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