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Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

The work you've done is interesting and I appreciate it, but it's really nothing more than a "precise estimate of a wild ass guess".

I have tested as INTJ many times before, but yesterday my result was ESFJ. Go figure. I've been a programmer all my life and I have the classic personality. All I did was answer their questions. I remember thinking that many of my answers could have easily gone either way. Maybe if I took it today (which isn't a Monday), some answers would be different. I have no idea why the result would vary so much.

You are doing analysis to 4 significant digits of work based upon the appropriateness of questions with no significant digits. You've built a concrete structure on top of quicksand. Nice job, but I really don't think it means much.

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The results vary so much because a fundamental tenet of Myers-Briggs is that Intro/Extroversion and all the other things they claim to measure aren't normally distributed.

It's as if you measured height and had to classify everyone into tall or short because your theory suggests that no-one is average height. Obviously most people are going to be actually hovering around the average but the minor variations in height and measurement combined with an abitrary cutoff mean that one day large chunks of people will be "tall" and the next they'll be "short" and vice versa.

And yet, based on your testing, one day you'll be telling these people they'd be ideally suited to basketball, then next suggesting they become jockeys.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator#Sta...

Thanks, I appreciate your feedback. Yes, I definitely should not have given anything to four significant figures. I did that without thinking; none of the calculations are precise enough to warrant more than three at most.

I've kept my opinions out of this discussion so far, but I definitely agree with what you say about the test. While the MBTI undoubtedly indicates something, its utility and validity are questionable. It's interesting for novelty value, but that's about it.

I'm definitely in the same boat as you: at various times over the past 5 years or so I have scored as INTP, ENTP and ISTP, so in both our cases, test-retest reliability is an issue. (I didn't take the test yesterday, because at this point I feel I'm too familiar with it to answer without bias.)

I make no claims about how valid this analysis is; it's certainly not going to appear in a statistics journal any time soon. I just decided to do it for fun and was surprised by just how drastically different the results are from the general population.

I think Myers and Briggs would argue that the test is a reflection of how you see yourself. If you get different results, it's because how you see your personality has changed. I've tested differently in the past, but as I've gotten older, I pretty consistently come up with INTP. I think that's because I know my personality better by now.

At the end of the day, all that matters is how you view your own personality. The test is just a way to try to pry that data out of your brain.

If that's the case, then it defeats the entire purpose of the test. It's not a personality test anymore, it's a self-image test. The idea of a personality test is to dig below your self-image to get a picture of what your 'innate personality' is. Whether they're successful at doing this is another story, but that's the idea.

I don't think there's such a thing as an "innate personality" - I'm a very different person than I was 10 years ago, and having just taken the test right now, the results are also likewise different (INTJ -> ESTJ if anyone's interested).

IMHO your personality is not something set in stone - it's a rather slow-changing beast surely, but I think it's a fallacy to believe that it's somehow cemented by some age.

Somewhere in the hitch hikers guide there is this line: "I can work out your personality problems to 6 decimal places", I never thought I'd see that in real life.

His analysis doesn't depend on how many significant digits there are: he's doing a hypothesis test, so all that matters is whether one number (a p-value which was not shown) is bigger than a threshold (.01). The fact that it is in most of the cases means that the variance in results that you mention has been handled by the sample size.

So I do think the results are meaningful.

Bear in mind that this is psychology we're talking about here. There are always going to be complications and areas that are fuzzy and undeterminable. That's just the nature of the beast.

Maybe the results aren't significant to full 4-digit precision and maybe individuals participating didn't test to their full true "type" ... but when large numbers participate we start to uncover some truth. It's nice to see the analysis.

when large numbers participate we start to uncover some truth.

Only true when the large numbers are representative of the whole population because the sample is random, as any elementary statistics textbook will point out, and as I pointed out in the previous thread: This kind of voluntary response poll would have exactly NIL value in answering the question that appears to be asked here, which is, what Myers-Briggs types are there on HN? The people who come forward to answer the poll are not a random sample of the tens of thousands of people who read HN.

http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=194473&tsta...

http://aurora.wells.edu/~srs/Math151-Fall02/Litdigest.htm

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5168/

A response group can be ever so large, but if that group was not randomly selected, there is no particular reason to suppose that it accurately represents the population of interest.

You are criticizing the MBTI model because it didn't work for you today? And what about the other millions of people who have taken it? You are quite willing to criticize something as quicksand when all you have is a subjective feeling.

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