[FishInTheWater]

That's the trick. It's about feelings of certainty, not actual measurable reproduceable predictions.

Most long-lived divination methods are very vague. Anything providing concrete predictions is easily proven wrong and discredited, only the vague survives.

But people rarely take ambiguous answers for what they are, and instead interpret them into something more certain.

And this lets divination exploit all kinds of biases. On top of the regular old confirmation bias, whenever the interpretation turns out wrong, people don't write off the divination method, but assume they merely "interpreted it wrong" (and often, the vagueness means they can retcon an interpretation that is true), and worse yet, assume that now they're better at interpreting so next time it's going to be a correct prediction.

Observe how little the personality tests actually say, they're just as ambiguous.

[jprete]

Nitpick: The five-factor scale (extroversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism) both reproduces and makes good life predictions.

MBTI and most other personality tests unfortunately seem to be astrology for the scientifically oriented.

[nostrademons]

The correlation between MBTI and the Big-5 is surprisingly strong (except for neuroticism, which has no representation in the MBTI):

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

I look at personality typologies in general as approximations. If you actually want to get to know a person, get to know them. But when you need to make a snap judgment about how someone might see the world and react to you, on very little information, it's handy to have a general archetype as guidelines. You can fill in all the details later.

It's not unlike Carmack's fast inverse square root, a Bloom filter, or how Google hasn't used PageRank since 2006 (instead substituting a cheaper-to-calculate approximation). Yes, they give wrong answers. But the answers are usually close enough that when you lack the computing power to get a better result, they'll do.

[HelloMcFly]

The biggest issue w/ MBTI and others like it is the desire to put you into a category as an outcome. This is really bad for reliability of the test - take it again and change just a few answers, you may be in a different category altogether! But it's often great for sparking team discussions on norms, behaviors, etc. But the sheen of science and validity can be misleading.