As an individual (Taurus) thoroughly interested in astrology, I often see this discussion brought up. As a short rebuttal, I feel as though many of those who tout astrology as a comprehensive personality test fail to understand what astrology attempts to identify. While the "value-add" is more subjective, I'm going to go ahead and say it's not as useless as this article claims. While I don't think anyone (especially employers) should rely heavily on astrology, I think it can provide a decent framework (or starting point) outlining basic facets of an individual's personality based on their own perspective. Though I often distrust individual claims about belonging a sign, given my interest in understanding myself and facets of my own personality, I enjoy discussing why a person may claim to be a part of a certain sign. For me, astrology tends to be little more than a starting point for discussing the finer parts of my own personality, values, and perspectives. I find that those who are equally interested in astrology share similar values in self-understanding, thus a starting point for some interesting discussion.

Your comment can be distilled to "it's fun to talk about".

However you don't need anything so complex for such a starting point. A classic demonstration that I saw was a large group of people who marked where they were on two lines. The first was how organized you were. The second was how extroverted you were. Based on this we divided into 4 groups, and began talking. It was surprising how much people in each group had in common. And how differently the groups behaved. The groups were:

Introverted and disorganized: Supporter. Good shoulder to cry on.

Introverted and organized: Analyst. They make good accountants.

Extroverted and disorganized: Promoter. High energy, lots of ideas, not a lot of carry through.

Extroverted and organized: Controller. They generally relate to, "My way or the highway."

I was in the Promoter quadrant. One of the things we had in common was that our spaces look like a tornado just tore through it, but please don't clean up because then we won't know where anything is. :-)

I would really doubt that it is zero, the relative position of the celestial bodies correlates with season. All sorts of human activities follow a yearly cycle, including birth rates and mortality rates. I have no doubt there is some correlation between astrological sign and personality.

I would take it further and say a good principle is that "everything is correlated with everything else", it is just a matter of the strength of the relationship. I will probably get downmodded for that, because it is in direct conflict the "null hypothesis" testing paradigm that has dominated data analysis for the last half century or so.

However there aren't correlations between those known correlations and the traits that astrology says that you should have. Therefore there is no known correlation between your astrological description and your personality. And yes, people have attempted to measure this.

'The author once had occasion to use 700 subjects in a study of publie opinion. After a factor analysis of the results, the factors were correlated with individual-difference variables such as amount of education, age, income, sex, and others. In looking at the results I was happy to find so many "significant" correlations (under the null-hypothesis model)-indeed, nearly all correlations were significant, including ones that made little sense. Of course, with an N of 700 correlations as large as .08 are "beyond the .05 level." Many of the "significant" correlations were of no theoretical or practical importance.' https://www.gwern.net/docs/statistics/1960-nunnally.pdf

"One of the common experiences of research workers is the very high frequency with which significant results are obtained with large samples. Some years ago, the author had occasion to run a number of tests of significance on a battery of tests collected on about 60,000 subjects from all over the United States. Every test came out significant. Dividing the cards by such arbitrary criteria as east versus west of the Mississippi River, Maine versus the rest of the country, North versus South, etc., all produced significant differences in means. In some instances, the differences in the sample means were quite small, but nonetheless, the p values were all very low. Nunnally (1960) has reported a similar experience involving correlation coefficients on 700 subjects. Joseph Berkson (1938) made the observation almost 30 years ago in connection with chi-square" http://www.tc.umn.edu/~nydic001/docs/teaching/Fall2011_PSY38...

"...it is regularly found that almost all correlations or differences between means are statistically significant. See, for example, the papers by Bakan [1] and Nunnally [8]. Data currently being analyzed by Dr. David Lykken and myself, derived from a huge sample of over 55,000 Minnesota high school seniors, reveal statistically significant relationships in 91% of pairwise associations among a congeries of 45 miscellaneous variables such as sex, birth order, religious preference, number of siblings, vocational choice, club membership, college choice, mother’s education, dancing, interest in woodworking, liking for school, and the like. The 9% of non-significant associations are heavily concentrated among a small minority of variables having dubious reliability, or involving arbitrary groupings of non-homogeneous or non-monotonic sub-categories. The majority of variables exhibited significant relationships with all but three of the others, often at a very high confidence level (p < 10–6)." http://www.fisme.science.uu.nl/staff/christianb/downloads/me...

For example what songs you like is tied to what media you watch which is tied to what politics you have. And most of that is tied to how liberal vs conservative you are.

It doesn't take many principal components to make most of the remaining correlations very small.

But correlations between astrological descriptions and personality start off small. So small that astrology is not a useful starting point to understanding people.

I never said it was. My problem is with the prevailing philosophy of doing statistical tests on whether there is exactly zero effect/correlation, ie testing for deviation from noise/chance. It is the most destructive idea ever pushed by mathematicians.

There's no evidence of this, so you should have doubts.

EG: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27310922 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25132151

I don't know much about astrology, but your "sign" is determined by the birthday right? From my understanding, it is basically a way of binning together sets of birthdays. There will probably be various artifacts and noise introduced by the binning process, but I am sure with large enough sample size you will see the correlation.

> I don't know much about astrology,

Now we agree.

I assure you with large enough sample size you will find some correlations though.

I can correlations the drop in pirates with a rise in global temperature, so what... correlations don't mean a damn thing by themselves, that's just data-mining bias.

Then please kindly don't defend it.

but your "sign" is determined by the birthday right?

I have actually studied astrology. Serious astrologers loathe sun sign astrology.

Sure it does. I've met people who will say things like "My sun sign is Virgo, but my personality is dominated by my Sagittarius moon", and then later say something like "I'm going through Saturn return, no wonder Pisces is such an influence".

If you compare someone's self-view ("I'm an Aries!") with their behavior (definitely a Gemini), you can draw conclusions. It's standard practice in astrology.

e.g. later Wittgenstein, process relational, integral theory, chaos magic

Measuring Cholesterol is another one, since you can't actually change cholesterol via diet and it has no relation to heart disease either (source: http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/panel-suggests-stop-warni... ). But the pharmaceutical industry still wants doctors to prescribe Statins and pours tons of money into advertising them to people and doctors, even though they're terrible for you and worthless.

It's troubling when industry grasps onto these measures and makes business models out of them. Wide spread acceptance of measures like these moves them out of the realm of homeopathy or astrology and into the realm of what people believe as relevant scientific measure. They benefit industry, but not the individual. Advertising allows that industry to continue to grow at the expense of good relevant data.

The episode talks about research showing how we can understand ourselves better as sets of behavior that we exhibit in different contexts, more than as having a single personality.

Put in simple words, you maybe introvert in some contexts and extrovert in others, and theses behaviors can change over time. You ARE not AN introvert, you exhibit introvert behaviors in context.

[1]: http://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/482836315/the-person...

This sentence strikes me as odd, because subjectively, the one thing that shines through the most with people, even people I haven't seen in 20+ years, is a distinct (and possibly largely immutable) personality. In fact, a large part of why I was so shy growing up is because people's personalities were so "bright" that I felt intimidated. Not of course "bright" in a literal, measurable sense, but in an irrational qualitative sense. And therein lies the problem with trying to discuss it rationally.

To this day I perceive distinct personalities in every child and pet I encounter. Not sure if related, these exact same entities seem drawn to me for some reason. I have often heard a pet owner say "my pet has never acted this way before" around me (such as sitting in my lap when it has never done so with anyone).

I wonder if it simply reflects what I see in them. Anyway. My point is that the inability to discuss something rationally is not evidence for its nonexistence.

They claimed there's simply an absence of unambiguous evidence that it exists.

My argument is then that we will never have evidence that it exists because evidence is rational and objective and its very reality and/or value is trapped in the irrational subjective eye of the beholder.

Trying to boil it down into, say, patterns of neuron activations would be like trying to boil down or derive the "value reality" of the Mona Lisa by analyzing and cataloguing the light wavelengths reflecting off of it.

So what of the unmeasurables?

The metric system was developed in the 1800s and you can do a simple search to find tons of criticism on it.

Being tall or short is accounted for by BMI, as it's a component of BMI. So that is not a problem.

The actual problem with BMI is that it attempts to measure body composition, but it assumes that fat is the only variable component of body composition. It's not--muscle can also vary. So people with a lot of muscle mass can have a very high BMI even if they have very little fat.

However, in practice this isn't a problem--nobody looks at a body builder and says they're fat because they have a high BMI. It's obvious when a high BMI is caused by fat and when it's caused by muscle.

BMI is a pragmatic way to measure body composition, which is effective for estimating body composition when body composition isn't obvious, such as in the case of a body builder. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either misinformed, or has political reasons for saying otherwise.

This is not to disagree with your overall point--industry does grasp into measurements and make business models out of them. But in the case of BMI, political interests have become invested in discrediting the BMI measurement, not in overcrediting it.

It's impossible to describe personalities without implying value judgments.

I randomly took the first Google link found under 'Myers Briggs' and ended up here:

https://www.16personalities.com/intj-personality

'Ironically, it is often best for them to remain where they are comfortable – out of the spotlight...'

https://www.16personalities.com/infp-strengths-and-weaknesse...

'Too Idealistic – INFPs often take their idealism too far, setting themselves up for disappointment as, again and again, evil things happen in the world.'

MBTI is basically this: You have a set of observed traits, and from that set we can tell you other traits you likely have based on observing many others that share the same traits.

Or in other words... -Observe trait A -Observe trait B -Observe trait C -Extrapolate trait D -Extrapolate trait E

What those sites are doing is... -Observe trait A -Extrapolate traits C, M, Q, X, Z

I interpreted 'prescriptive' as making 'should' rather than 'is' statements.

Misuse of a tool does not invalidate the tool.

No one's disputing that a useless tool can be misused. They're questioning the use of useless tools at all. They give the illusion of understanding to those not interested in evidence.

False.

> and MBTI has as much scientific validity and predictive value.

As it can be mapped directly to the big 5, this is also false.

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

Oh dear, there seems to be an epidemic of people's comparators not working. You might want to start small: try comparing two oranges, then an orange and an apple. Before long you'll be comparing supernovas to salamanders!

(Or perhaps you meant the rather less categorical "I think they're very different". I harp on this because I find "not remotely comparable" excessively dismissive. It's fine to disagree, just don't act like there's no possible way the other person might have a valid point)

If you disregard the people who claim astrology is prescriptive, and pay attention to only those aspects of it that describe tendencies - all the most convincing astrology nuts I've met do this - it can be quite... warming.

I don't put faith in or know much about astrology, but I do know there are many different types and areas of astrology and not all of them have to do with telling you how to pick your lotto numbers tomorrow.

A lot of people talk about signs and astrology in terms of being able to read people and determine personality traits of others.

> don't put faith in or know much about astrology

You're right, you don't, so perhaps don't sit here and defend this pseudo-scientific nonsense that you know nothing about.

It's not clear to me how that's different.

Sure, you can choose your type by responding differently to the questions, or finding a "practitioner" who assigns a type you prefer, but the same applies to astrology: shop around until you hear what you want to here.

False. It's exactly the opposite, the label doesn't assign the traits, rather the traits create the label; if your traits change so does the label, it's nothing more than a description of who you are now according to your own answers to those traits questions. And it aids greatly in think about yourself and others and how people differ and exactly in what ways they can differ.

> It's not clear to me how that's different.

Then learn more.

When I first encountered M-B it rescued a sour relationship with an ISTJ boss who thought I wrote content-free status reports, where I thought I wrote well-summarized round-ups that avoided meaningless minutia. Later, the table was reversed when I had an ISTJ report who drowned me in more details than I could (or needed to) process. I used M-B to help us workout guidelines for talking with each other so that we were productive instead of both frustrated.

So M-B has been useful to me. But it should not be used for making hiring/placement decisions. I really see it as an information processing styles inventory and little more.

In that same spirit alcohol is a pretty great social lubricant. A little bit of booze lowers people's inhibitions enough to have fun conversations.

It's not scientific, it's totally based in reason. It's reasonable to deny global warming because winters are getting colder than ever. It's not reasonable to deny climate change because winters are getting colder than ever.

There's nothing wrong with someone drawing a conclusion from their personal experience, that's going to be full of emotion, opinion and hopefully some logic.

I get your concern, but the same folks who make hiring decisions based on Myers Briggs will tell you angels were watching over them when they narrowly avoided a car crash. Or their relative visited them a month after they passed away. it's mostly benign. When it's not benign, they're unreasonable. Only then is it possibly worth the effort to persuade them to be a bit more rational.

But, yes. I mean 'rhetorically useful' or 'a social hack'

Depending on where you are from I suppose.

Edit: I believe "pretense" was the incantation you were after.

Because those mentioned deal with random events, where X and Y are uncorrelated (being X a date of birth or card drawn from Tarot and Y is some personality characteristic)

MB do ask you questions from which you can predict - to some degree - some outcomes (how do you think a strong Extrovert changes from a strong Introvert)?

Just don't do something stupid like "this job requires a INTJ only" or think that the distribution is bimodal or that their behaviour will follow a strict pattern.

(It's not like the rest of "behavioral science" can make repeatable predictions and reproduce papers compared to other scientific branches)

A nuanced discussion would probably accept that these are continuous axes, but instead they get treated as clusters, distorting even casual analysis.

Further, it says nothing about the fluctuations in magnitude over time, some days 'E' might be more important than 'I' and it really can swap on other days. Or even how accurately people self report.

So, if you are 'strongly' I and weakly P that does not change the order to show P is more dominate over J than I is over E. AKA, magnitude is literally not part of the test.

When discussing the results as a class, the strength of a type seemed to correlate reasonably with behavior, and explain more than the clusters on their own, eg, all the strong NPs had similar epistemological views and styles, fading towards an SJ style as the scores people had changed.

What a lot of people seem to forget, though, is the MBTI doesn't account for effects from disorders only healthy variation and it's about who you are right now, not who you are permanently. People vary over time.

Which, of course, means that we're abandoning the actual test to get a substantive measurement.

e.g. INFP leads with a primary Introverted Feeling (judging), an auxiliary Extroverted Intuition (perceiving), then Introverted Sensing, and finally Extroverted Feeling.

Some of the better tests will help identify these cognitive processes and then attempt to find the best fitting type based on them. You can read more about the cognitive functions here: http://www.cognitiveprocesses.com/Cognitive-Functions/index....

It's too bad that so many people see the types as diametrically opposed (e.g. Feeling vs Thinking -- you do both!)

Amazingly, I've had arguments about this with folks. (probably E folks). They claimed that "it never changes", which is just patently untrue. Perhaps E folks don't introspect enough to re-evaluate their views on things? I know I tested different 5 years ago compared to when I took it 20 years ago.

I don't really see how you couldn't retest at least somewhat differently.

I think this is actually the most common experience. The data I've seen says that scores on all four 'axes' are normally distributed. So it's actually fairly exceptional to have strong, predictable positions for every letter; cutting a bunch of normal distributions down the middle means most of us are on a boundary.

And yes, it's probably those silly E folks saying they never change. God forbid we wake up tomorrow testing as E, we'll have a paradox on our hands.

The folks who have argued that point with me over the years all happened to be strong E. I'm talking perhaps 3-4 people over 20 years - not a huge number to go on, but it was the only consistent I saw (male/female/old/young/etc).

Me: "Wow, I took this a few years ago and was a moderate F, but now I'm a slight T".

Them: "That's just not possible. It doesn't work that way. You just don't remember what you had before. It doesn't change".

Me: "WTF??"

As far as I understood the test, it results in your brain's _dominant_ mode on four axes. So you are either predominantly introverted or extraverted. There is nothing in the theory stating that you are introverted 100%, all the time.

I'm not suggesting that MBTI claims we're 100% E or I. I'm saying that it assigns binary distributions on those axes, which would make it meaningful to talk about "E dominant" and "I dominant" people. Every study I've seen of the actual data, though, says that these are normally distributed traits.

So there are some people with distinctive, meaningful dominant modes on these axes. But the bulk of the population is at the center of the distributions, where marginal differences are being talked about like high-significance bimodal results.

This isn't inevitably the case, but we live in a world where MBTI results are still being used to determine who's suited to which jobs. If you're hiring sales guys who are 51% extroverted and refusing ones who are 49% extroverted, that supposed binary distribution is misleading you badly.

So you'd get an I at less than 45%, an E at more than 55%, and an X if you were on the border.

Further, you said they were normally distributed, but didnt talk about the variance. It's possible that people who are just a little from the middle by % of population are meaningfully different than the average -- a quarter standard deviation could be a meaningful amount of change in the real world.

So your argument doesn't actually support your claim: with the inclusion of an X band, it's possible the gap between E and I is meaningful in real world situations. We can't know merely by knowing it's normally distributed, we need to analyze the standard deviation size versus the minimal meangingful difference in the real world.

Several instances I've seen of MBTI didn't offer X, but that's definitely an improvement. The one I got for high school career services actually crashed if you 'tied', because that hadn't been accounted for at all.

Without the X band, "normal distribution" is enough to say things are broken. It means that you're consistently dividing similar people while grouping dissimilar people, which isn't what I like in a cluster.

With the X band, SD becomes important and a wide distribution might provide good results. Anecdotally, this could match the high attention given to E/I versus F/T - high SD axes would be relevant to more people.

Having said that, I'm still skeptical of much of the MBTI literature. It definitely deals in bimodal distributions, asserting that these clusterings are features of the territory rather than the map. If the peak frequency is a value the test can't inform about, I think that still invalidates much of the literature even if the test has some predictive power.

While I get the criticism of those tests as poorly implemented pop-psych, it only seems fair to attack the MBTI itself as a concept if you criticize the actual written, send-in-and-evaluate official version. The version I took of that (which came with a ton of propaganda from the testing company) featured both an X band and numeric strength scores for each category. It also featured a lot more questions than the typical online free ones, and had redundant questions the way that standard psych evals do. So at least some of the "professional" MBTI people are providing that kind of test, even if their analysis is all about bimodals and nonsense.

> With the X band, SD becomes important and a wide distribution might provide good results. Anecdotally, this could match the high attention given to E/I versus F/T - high SD axes would be relevant to more people.

My main point was that the joint distribution increases the spread away from XXXX to things like XXFX or XNXX, where even if you're still near the exact middle, there's less people exactly at average, and so the test is more likely to relay at least one fact in one category about the test taker than any particular category is to say something useful.

So even though the test can't say anything about the hyperbox in the middle of the range, it is relatively small because getting a little way away from the exact center likely says something about at least one category, even if the majority still can't have anything useful said about them.

Think of it this way: assume that the test can't say anything about the middle 20% of people for a given trait, and that the traits are independent (ie, how you score on one has nothing to do with the others). The odds that you're XXXX is (0.2)^4 = 0.0016. So only ~1 in 500 people would get nothing out the MBTI, even though ~1 in 5 has at least one category with an X.

And that's assuming a relatively large X band. Drop the X band to 5%, and it's only ~1 in 200,000 that would get XXXX.

> Having said that, I'm still skeptical of much of the MBTI literature.

I threw out the marketing booklet mostly unread after the statistical nonsense of the first few pages was too much when I paid to take the professional version of the test in school.

The test is alright, but not great and modern data analysis can probably do a much better PCA than the MBTI is, but the company is outright moronic in what they say. And others can be much worse.

MBTI is a just-so story with a lot of marketing behind it.

The core of the theory is to highlight natural preferences in the way we use cognitive functions. It's a pretty good and useful model. It's not a definite one though, like all the models we have it's meant to be improved and replaced over the years (like in physics).

99% of the critics about MBTI are focusing on the tests (which I agree are not accurate) and the authors don't understand the theory behind it - which is the really useful part. (Carl Jung's work, cognitive functions preferences, etc)

I, for one, am totally alright with MBTI-style questions as a tool for analysis/introspection. RibbonFarm has some great writing about identifying 'dominant' cognitive functions based on magnitude data from MBTI.

Strictly accurate? No. A useful framework for planning? Absolutely.

MBTI is also an organization, though. It charges money for training, issues education materials, and gives trainers strict guidelines on what assessments are ok to make. That system is hideously inaccurate and deserves criticism. It asserts that the test is accurate to reality, that the personality types are 'opposed', and that people are bimodal on the four axes. Many of those claims explicitly contradict the Jungian theories that inspired them.

So it's easy to overreach when criticizing the MB model, and most articles like this aren't clear about their target. But the actual MBTI organization - which is still popular with big companies in its original form - is wrong in terms of its own theoretical foundations, defended with bad data, and deserves extensive criticism.

The MBTI is mostly just useful in that it's one of the few things that actually sorts humans in a hyperdimensional way, which is really how we're best categorized.

We're all slight wobbles (well, statistically speaking) around the center of a like 20-100 dimension distribution.

MBTI is basically just PCA on that space in to a 4-dimensional one, and while we can argue how evenly its bucketing split the actual distribution of people (not ideally, but not terribly), or how much information was lost in that downcasting (a lot!), I think the basic premise of viewing people as a composite of slight differences across many dimensions is a useful viewpoint we don't normally engage in.

So if you could pick 16 LotR characters that form a hypercube of traits, then assigning LotR characters is the same as the MBTI. The problem is usually that LotR quizzes and the like are a) much smaller than that (4-8 characters) and b) not laid out in a hypercube (ie, there's not 4+ dimensions of wobble, there's 2 or 3).

My point wasn't to argue about how well they did that (not particularly), but rather that it's useful to approach issues of understanding personality in those terms at all. That's the real innovation of things like the MBTI: that we should analyze the distribution of personalities in terms of PCA, and that we should probably use a few components, rather than like 1 or 2.

Of course, we could do the actual analysis much better than the MBTI did.

The main reason I don't think Myers-Briggs can be a true-ism is that each dimension is actually a spectrum. For example I am about 60% "I" (and thus 40% "E") so the various "I" true-isms only slightly factor on my personality.

On a more productive point, your post gave no evidence at all about why M-B is useful

As a tool, though, its utility remains doubtful. Its test-retest reliability is very low, meaning that, if you give the same person the test at two different times, you're likely to get two different results. This strongly suggests that, while the test might capture aspects of a person's personality, it's also functioning like a glorified mood ring. Without some way to separate those two aspects, its utility as an indicator of anything useful about any one individual is highly suspect.

Admittedly, the test is arbitrary in many ways, but you can't deny the questions -- about introversion, how logical, emotive, and judgmental you are, etc -- represent the subjective experience we have of others' personalities, even if the categories are incomplete, nonlinear, redundant, or transient.

Results being independently reproducible is the foundation of science. Meyers-Briggs fails that simple metric.

But people take the test once, and then use the results for a long period of time. Guess what? At night, blood sugar level goes down. it's no longer X. And likewise with this test.

Same thing, here. I wouldn't put much stock into a single result on a single test, but I think there's some broader value to be gained by examining the trend, the fluctuations, and what you wind up as more often than not.

The only assertion I have to disprove here is that the test is "worthless".