Giftedness Is Statistically Associated with Particular MBTI Results

I'm also intrigued that people are voting up the comment which is a sarcastic attack on the people who believe something, while voting me down for attempting to discuss it in a logical manner rather than, say, engaging in discussion of the topic.

So, would you care to explain how it can be correlated with something in a series of studies and still be meaningless?

Speaking only for myself (as someone who consistently scores on the far end of T), viewing it as a spectrum of F<->T makes a great deal of intuitive sense, and directly mirrors my personal observations. Just as I tend to quickly write off very emotional people as irrational, I suspect someone leaning strongly toward F would similarly write me off as a heartless bastard.

From your perspective, as someone sitting mid-way between the two, I can appreciate how that distinction might not seem as clear-cut. It's something I hadn't considered before; thank you for that.

That's not really accurate. It would be safer to say that people who respond to that poll on HN self-report having NT intuitive thinking traits at about seven times higher than the usual distribution would predict, assuming no one voted multiple times.

Which is to say, it's really silly to draw much of anything meaningful from an internet poll.

More likely to be P than J too...

This quote from the article may help:

"However, according to McCauley and Myers, this is not necessarily related to intelligence; rather, it is related to the match between the academic characteristics of IN types and the content of aptitude tests. When gifted adolescents are compared to general high school students according to their preference for intuition, they are more likely to enjoy solving new problems and dislike doing the same thing repeatedly. They also are conclusive, impatient, and interested in complicated situations. They might be more interested in novelty according to the type theory."

From what I remember, it usually means "Scored in the top N% on a standardized test", where N is some small-ish number, roughly proportional to the amount of noise that local parents make when their children don't get labeled as "gifted." In my town parents tended to make a lot of noise, so it was around 15 or 20% of the students, but in some cases people got in directly because of parental bitching, so I don't know what the real cutoff was from the tests (which everyone had to take, at least in my school district).

Some of the dumbest people I've ever had the displeasure to interact with were in the gifted program, and a couple of the smartest ones were not; it's a rough measure, certainly, but that doesn't mean it's altogether meaningless. It probably has a decent but not overwhelming correlation with actual intelligence, whatever way you may wish to define that.

Edit: It's also worth noting that more and more districts don't have gifted programs any more, due to an increased emphasis on getting the lowest scoring students past thresholds for NCLB.

I'd be curious to hear what others here thought of these programs if they were available - the one that I was a part of actually pulled us out of school one full day per week, and let us choose and work on our own projects, so I found it very valuable, far more than the missed schooldays would have been, but I know there's a lot of variability in these things.

Within the context of this research, I guess "gifted" really means "selected to participate in special courses at school", which by itself introduces huge biases. The studies might be measuring the kinds of personalities people expect -- and therefore select -- to be in gifted courses (shy, introspective). Or it might be measuring a personality change brought on by being in such courses, either through the instruction itself or by being surrounded by similar personalities.

I think that's what they're using the word to mean. Which has always seemed a bit silly to me; if you want to say someone' clever. I'm not sure where using the word "gifted" comes from; perhaps a desire not to insult people who aren't "gifted" by labelling them not clever.