[llamaz]

I'm sick of this Myers-Briggs pseudo-science showing up everywhere. It's unethical to sell a discredited theory of the world for monetary gain.

It's like Dungeons and Dragon - people identify with their type/class, except people take MBTI more seriously than they do D&D.

[Swinx43]

I completely agree, this type of snake oil entrepreneurship is really getting on my nerves. It seems that peddling pseudo science is a very lucrative business opportunity and as such there is no small amount of people willing to jump on it.

Another thing that truly gets me annoyed is the listing out of all these "things" that an author has been, none of them the reader would know if they have actually been any good at it. I could list a myriad of things "I have been" and make me look like a renaissance man except half of them I have been not even average at.

[maus42]

I knew some people who took the DnD ability score classification seriously, and had trouble accepting anything different (some other tabletop RPGs who dared to have different list of abilities...) because they were not "real".

(Okay that "some people" was actually me as kid.)

[jiiam]

I know some adults who often say something and then continue "But I can't lie, I'm a paladin".

[k__]

I liked the alignments.

Never played DnD, but after reading the definitions, I and my friends found myself to be "chaotic neutral" :D

[jiiam]

In Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, I'm a SpWz of Gozag.

In D&D, I'm a utility/crowd control generalist Elf Wizard.

In real life I never bothered to check. It's not like I'll get any free spell out of it.

[B-Con]

There do seem to be patterns in personality, and I have found MB to be very helpful in getting a high-level overview of another person's general approach to the world. Reading the descriptions and discussing it with people led to a lot of "you think that way?" sort of moments from both sides. Very informative.

I've found almost no helpful science on personality categorization (Big 5 is minimally helpful), so until there is I find this a useful starting tool.

As a side note: The most misunderstood aspect of MBTI is that it's purely a system for categorizing high-level approach toward action and information in life. It's not what you must do, will do, can do, can't do, etc. It's only about certain aspects of outlook on life.

[hanyoddha]

I wouldn't really call it pseudo-science. For long I really did think there was something wrong with me for not being able to choose what I wanted to do in life, since I enjoyed doing a lot of things. It would also be a major cause of depression for me. But it's only when I took the test that I figured out that there are so many out there who are facing similar day-to-day challenges like I am. There's comfort in knowing that. I'm also a part of the closed community ENFP group on Facebook and people really do have the same problem. Multiple careers, lack of clarity and focus.

[kybernetikos]

The fact that these personality profiles can help people realise both that there are others like them and that different people may have different motivations and challenges is enormously useful and a valid insight. That does not mean that the profile itself is not pseudoscience though.

[shubhamjain]

I am sorry but there is no reason to believe how a particular trait which troubles almost everyone can be based on a certain personality type. There are lots of take-an-interest-in-everything people out there who can't decide what they want to do, even though being particularly good at lots of things. I am not denying why this question might trouble you, it has troubled me for a long time myself but being a so called INTJ-type, I can't say if the personality-bucketing is the reason you should nail it down to.

[B-Con]

> I am sorry but there is no reason to believe how a particular trait which troubles almost everyone can be based on a certain personality type.

Not everyone struggles with this, though. Given that it isn't an evenly-distributed problem, there is possibly a pattern between those who do struggle with it.

[hanyoddha]

ENFP or not, INTJ or not. The biggest comforting aspect for me from that test was to know that I'm not the only one who feels this way or has the same problem. I've spent many years feeling totally aimless after having dabbled in one two many careers.

[fidrelity]

What was your personal solution if I may ask?

[shubhamjain]

I am pretty happy that I am a generalist. I have been passionate about lots of things from front-end development, linux kernel internals to online marketing (although, I am pretty bad at that) and I believe, that's the reason I can suggest ideas to marketing people who don't know enough technology and to programmers who don't know enough marketing.

However, I have learnt to separate facts from knowledge. Reading books about marketing will mostly give you facts without context but if you to talk to people who do marketing or try to raise a blog to several thousand subscribers, you will gain a lot of knowledge.

Doing a lot of things, in my experience will give you more perspective and experience than anything else and frankly, there is enough time in the world to do that.

[cylinder]

And your employment situation?

I'm the same as you, once again back in the career change cycle.

There's really no corporation out there who wants a generalist unless you're the CEO perhaps, but you have to be an expert to get there.

I'm pretty sure generalists were just meant to be merchants / small business owners but those opportunities have dwindled away in our modern economy.

[lmm]

It's not pseudo-science. It has been validated, and has good test-retest reliability by psychological standards (numbers off the top of my head but it's something like 80% immediately, and something like 65% after five years) - so it's measuring something, and that something is reasonably stable.

What is true is that there's no bimodality in the distribution - each factor is a bell curve - and so talking about E/I is similar to talking about above-average IQ/below-average IQ rather than talking about the numbers. But it's not pseudo-science.

[shubhamjain]

How has it been validated? Vox did an article on how it is based on unproven theories [1]. A proper validation in my impression would be if people are misattributed their personalities, will their psychological reaction to the result be different? Frankly, I don't think anyone should be excited by any test that says something positive about you. The big test is when it says negative things. For me, seeing all the personalities description, I can vaguely relate to all of them - a perfect showcase of Barnum effect [2].

[1]: http://www.vox.com/2014/7/15/5881947/myers-briggs-personalit...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect

[raverbashing]

Rhetorical question: is eye color scientific? Do you believe in eye colors?

Saying that MB is "not scientific" is laughable. It is a measure. Probably more scientific than deriving a measure called QI from 20 random questions

You can of course question if conclusions based on each MB type are scientific.

The personality descriptions for the most part are just concluded from the measure (which of course have some variance between people, it's not a cookie cutter approach) and of course some people have a different measure in each axis.

If the descriptions fit you you're probably in the middle, because some of them certainly don't fit me

From the link you quoted: "The characteristics measured by the test have almost no predictive power on how happy you'll be in a situation, how you'll perform at your job, or how happy you'll be in your marriage."

Apart from the 1st measure, I wholeheartedly agree. But that's not how it should be used

"Actual data tells psychologists that these traits do not have a bimodal distribution. Tracking a group of people's interactions with others, for instance, shows that as Jung noted, there aren't really pure extroverts and introverts, but mostly people who fall somewhere in between."

Correct. And people may be more introverted or extroverted in some situations.

But it still measures if a certain person is more introverted than extroverted

Now the warning about taking it as a clear-cut indicator of performance in a certain job or position is definitely correct

[rimantas]

Yes, eye color is scientific. No, MB is not scientific.

[strathmeyer]

Better get to work contacting every university in America.

[carljung]

> Saying that MB is "not scientific" is laughable. It is a measure.

One problem is that the thing being measured can decide how it wants to be measured. It's easy for me to select a type from MBTI.

The claim "you have one of 16 personality types" is not falsifiable. Why does it have to be one of those types?

The things that MBTI purports to measure - E/I, S/N, F/T, J/P are just based on Carl Jung's made up theories about how the mind works.

The questions on the MBTI are supposed to correlate precisely to Jung's scales, but what if they don't? Language is awfully malleable. Do I prefer abstract or concrete? Give me a break. (Yes, I get it, abstract is N, concrete is S.) Would I rather stay home and read a book or go to the party? Can I have a book reading party at home? Can I bring a book to the party? Can I read a book about a party? What if I don't like books or parties?

The whole concept of dualism is pure philosophy.

[raverbashing]

> One problem is that the thing being measured can decide how it wants to be measured.

This is a problem in psychology regardless of the type of test. If it's a person asking questions they might be able to detect if someone is skewing the answers

> The claim "you have one of 16 personality types" is not falsifiable. Why does it have to be one of those types?

You have 4 variables, X0 to X4, and a measure of each (let's say between -1 and 1). Then you divide this space in 2 regions per variable. That's how you get 16 (2 ^ 4) types. You might pick 3 regions per variable and have 81 types, harder to work with though)

> The questions on the MBTI are supposed to correlate precisely to Jung's scales

I agree with this, but when measuring something with lots of variables you always have a certain dimensionality reduction (and noise).

And of course it varies with age and situation, but you will be hard pressed to have a INFP as a football coach

But of course you know all that ;)

[lmm]

> The claim "you have one of 16 personality types" is not falsifiable. Why does it have to be one of those types?

We define there to be those types when we're measuring - that's like saying the claim "an object has a temperature that's a number" is not falsifiable. We can test the same object multiple times with multiple thermometers and get the same results (while getting different results for different objects). That's the part that's falsifiable - test-retest reliability. If we have that then we can be confident that our measure measures something. (Then the next step is seeing whether the measure is useful by seeing if it correlates with other things).

[Whisperchamber]

I find it ironic that people keep citing sites as the "Vox" and the popular in this place "Vice" as some kind of reliable sources when the former have repeatedly promoted in the recent past blatantly racist theories such as the "Whiteness"

[1] http://www.vox.com/2015/7/24/9023721/white-whiteness-race-id... [2] http://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/8/22/6056835/white-black-soci... [3] http://www.vox.com/2014/10/31/7134247/whiteness-project

[amelius]

So you are saying that when Google or any other MegaCorp would know your MBTI type, they would know nothing about your personality? Or in other words, that MBTI type has zero correlation to personality traits? Sorry, but that does not make sense.

Another way to look at it is the following. I'm not a machine learning expert but I suppose MBTI is simply a way to cluster maximum correlation vectors into a compact representation. This representation happens to contain 4 bits of information (since there are 16 MBTI types).

[shubhamjain]

I won't say there is nothing that can be concluded but the classification itself is problematic since there is definitely some spillage over common traits of the personalities. I can have more belief if the assertion is more alone the lines that you are xx% "abc" type.

[lmm]

The full test does give you that.