The problem with these results is not that they're inaccurate, it's that people think they measure a permanent aspect of themselves. In truth, people's personalities are malleable - if you spend all your time working on a computer, you become more introverted - or at least, you start to express your introverted tendencies more strongly. If you switch jobs and have to spend all your days talking to people, you'll become more extroverted. From this perspective, of course a of a group of engineers personalities show high introversion. But are they introverted because they are engineers or engineers because they are introverted? Or is it a little from column A and a little from column B with a different ratio for each person measured?

In the end, Myers Briggs is harmful because it gives a simplistic view of something complicated, and makes people believe they are stuck with a particular personality. In reality all it does is give an estimate of your outlook on the day you took the test. Personality is emergent as a response to your needs to interact with the world given your current career, relationship, peer group, social standing, and so on. It's not fixed. Or at least, it's far less fixed and far more fluid than Myers Briggs would have you believe.

This is a nice, very readable article by a psychologist specialising in lifespan personality development: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/06/30/4840534...

"while personality traits are relatively stable over time, they can and often do gradually change across the life span. What's more, those changes are usually for the better. Many studies, including some of my own, show that most adults become more agreeable, conscientious and emotionally resilient as they age. But these changes tend to unfold across years or decades, rather than days or weeks"

The important word there is "tend". For most people their personality slowly shifts over decades. However, that doesn't mean faster change is impossible. People's personalities can change quickly, either due to life changing events or to intentional effort to change - for example, nearly anyone who is neurotic, depressed, anxious, easily angered, or similar who practices mindfulness daily for 6 months will experience a reduction in those aspects of their personality. Combine that with CBT, new hobbies, changing to a less stressful career, choosing better friends, more exercise, better diet, better sleep, and so on, and you'll experience even faster change. However, most people don't do this, especially when they are older, and hence the statistics show that changes tend to be slow.

Mindfulness isn’t necessary helpful by itself, nor is CBT. You also need to have the capacity to change, which is not a given.

In my case, unmedicated, my executive function is compromised. This means I lack the self-control necessary to regulate emotions and control what I’m paying attention to.

Your argument sounds like it's taken out of a motivational book.

You can do it! You can become a better person! You just need to change every single detail of your life and you will be a better person!

Well, I was trying to phrase it positively because the original example I came up with was that if your entire family dies in a car crash, it's likely to cause an instant, long lasting negative change in your personality. Guess I swung it too far in the other direction haha.

But changes can be negative in a less drastic way too. For example, I'm sure the forced isolation of the past year has brought out depressive tendencies in a lot of people. In the face of that, we do need to be reminded that we can take charge and make positive changes in ourselves and that there are tools like meditation or CBT to help us (although it's certainly not so easy or works so universally as suggested in certain motivational books).

Worth noting is that many psychologists are calling for the end of solitary confinement in the prison system citing the adverse effects it has on inmates personalities.

> In truth, people's personalities are malleable

That's what I observed myself - I can have different MBTI depending on situation and context. When "people change" it's mostly the context that changes, and a different personality is assumed like a role by the mind, as if the mind just wants to adapt to each situation as best possible.

Reminds me of the unlimited ability of GPT-3 to assume personalities and points of view, with the right trigger you can get it to be anyone. I'm not saying people's personalities are equally flexible but they do have a degree of context flexibility.

I think degree of malleability would be the most interesting personality facet to measure.

Anecdotally, I think it varies quite a bit between people and changes over time.

* In truth, people's personalities are malleable *

Thank you for saying that. There was an interview before Carl Jung passed away, where even he talked about how in certain situation where arch type changes. We all ought to view tests like Myer Briggs as a way to shade light on people and their ways of being.

I dunno? It seems my type is pretty much fixed between INFL and INTP.

Everyone thinks I’m extroverted because most of my job involves talking to people.

People's personality's certainly are malleable, but the MBTI does not purport to measure personality. It (attempts to) measure personality type. i.e. the underlying baseline from which your personality starts. At no point does it claim that people's personalities don't change. Of course they do.

Perhaps you are assuming that people are "tabula rasa" - blank slates - from which their personalities develop. The MBTI is a criticism of this: it asserts that there is variance in the nature component of people's personalities. That two people exposed to exactly the same environmental stimuli from birth will not react to it the same way.

IMO this is fairly obviously true if you think about it (even if you don't think the MBTI accurately describes the differences.)

> It (attempts to) measure personality type. i.e. the underlying baseline from which your personality starts.

Which proof do you have that such a thing exists? Underlying personality traits sounds to me like a theory of epicycles when a simpler more plausible theory exists.

I don't have proof. I'm merely correcting the parent on what the theory claims. That said, the only thing that "underlying baseline from which your personality starts" really claims is that there is a "nature" (as opposed to nurture) component to people's personalities.

While I'm sure not everyone would agree with that, it's not exactly implausible. Indeed it must surely seem likely to anyone who has observed how wildly differently young children react to the same situation. And has been borne out in twin studies, etc.

Now that doesn't mean that the MBTI has the right theory about the nature of the "nature" component, but my point is that if you are taking the MBTI to be a description of someone's total personality rather than just the nature component of their personality, then you are completely misconstruing what it is claiming.

As far as my understanding goes the nature vs. nurture debate in psychology is really old school. Like it was fairly concluded before The Bell Curve came out in the mid nineties and argued in favor of nature.

As I understand it that arguing nature vs. nurture usually stems from badly defined concepts often defined in terms of how they are measured (e. Operationally defined). What happens then is that you get a bunch of correlation between various concepts just because one concept pollutes into another, not because of how we are geared. Nature vs. nurture is also an awfully dualistic approach and completely misses (or ignores) interaction effects.

To tie this into this thread. GP is not saying that nurture defines personality as opposed to nature. They are simply claiming that it is malleable. How malleable, under which circumstances, malleable to what, which aspects, etc. are all still open questions which may be ascribed to ones genes (and maybe not; hence the open question). This is the interaction effect which the dualistic nature vs. nurture debate completely misses.

I would actually go further then GP and say that the question is flawed. Personality is not a useful psychological concept and does not describe behavior any better then, say, political leaning, religion, or how many languages you speak. That is to say, measuring personality and categorizing people based on personality traits brings us no closer in understanding human behavior. That is to say, measuring personalities and ascribing traits is not only harmful—like GP says—but also bad psychology.

esperent's comment that I originally replied to not only claims that personality is malleable (I completely agree), but that MBTI theory claims that is not. That represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what the theory is claiming.

> How malleable, under which circumstances, malleable to what, which aspects, etc. are all still open questions

Indeed. And the MBTI theory makes a specific and very interesting claim about this open question: that what is malleable, under which circumstances, etc varies between people. And furthermore, that there is an extent to which that variation follows certain set patterns (possibly as a strong statistical average with exceptions rather than a sure thing), such that we can classify people by which pattern(s) of malleability they follow.

This doesn't mean that all malleability is subject to these patterns. There can still be aspects that are common to all people, and aspects that are completely individual. But the claim is that there also some aspects that apply to group of peoples.

Of course, such a claim needs to be substantiated and the current evidence is mostly from clinical observation rather than scientific experimentation. But whether it is true or not there is good reason to believe that the lack of scientific evidence stems from a lack of ability to measure accurately because (as you say) mainstream psychology has very little to say on this topic at the moment and exactly how this aspect of the mind works is still considered an open question.

> That is to say, measuring personality and categorizing people based on personality traits brings us no closer in understanding human behavior. That is to say, measuring personalities and ascribing traits is not only harmful—like GP says—but also bad psychology.

I should note that the MBTI does NOT measure external traits. It (attempts to) measure an actual functional mechanism in the mind/brain (which it postulates to exist).

> The problem [is] that people think they measure a permanent aspect of themselves. In truth, people's personalities are malleable...

The one and only time I did the Myers-Briggs stuff, the speaker made it absolutely abundantly clear:

1) Traits were contextual. We're different around family, friends, coworkers, commuting into work... (Duh, right?)

2) Though people can fake traits, like an introvert acting extroverted, doing so requires more effort. So maybe ponder that your resting state traits are more likely the "real you".

2.1) The speaker used an ice berg metaphor, which stuck with me. People present an aspect of themselves in public. With effort, you can rotate your ice berg to show other aspects. Removing the effort allows the ice berg to find its resting state.

I’m a bit lost. Combining 1) and 2), it means the test is against contextual and “fakeable” traits ?

Setting apart 3), as I would imagine a rotated iceberg might not come back to a resting state identical to before the rotation.

If the goal is to predict anything, we could also assume that context will change with time (even working at the same company, people change, assignments change, incentives change).

All in all it feels like a super weird disclaimer for something that is supposed to be useful.

You're the exact same person at church, work, hanging out with your buddies watching sports (or playing board games), doorbelling for a political campaign, baby sitting your nieces, etc?

Per the article, your traits are on a spectrum. Not binary. You may be more extroverted at church and less at work.

While the article does mention non-"binarizing" (I prefer "non-discretizing" as the more common parlance) in the sense of treating the 4 dimensions as axes not buckets, the article does not mention context sensitivity like church-home, buddies, babysitting, same/opposite sex, older/younger, etc., etc.

I just don't understand which of these criticisms doesn't apply to the Big Five too.

They do. The best criticism I see on the Mayers Briggs is the one that attacks the whole notion of personality tests (including Mayers Briggs and the Big 5).

Big 5 is not an established scientific theory, it has never been. In fact in the field of psychology, personality is as useful as a concept as your astrological sign is. There is no evidence that personality trades exists outside of factor analyzing pen and paper tests, let alone that they can be measured and classified.

For personality to be a useful psychological concept it would need to be predictive of behavior. So far we have more evidence that religion has a bigger role then personality traits. E.g. studies find that the more religious people are the less they obey in the Milgram experiment, however there is no evidence that people that score highly on the agreeableness factor do.

> however there is no evidence that people that score highly on the agreeableness factor do.

I went and did some exploring of the literature and found a study[1] that seems to contradict this statement. E.g. they found a significant correlation between Agreeableness factor and obedience in the Milgram experiment. However, the effect size is fairly small. Political leaning was also significant with similar effect size, and this study has yet to be replicated.

[1]: https://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_01158395/document

Personality is mostly established by age 6. Its more plastic than people realise, but it can be altered over a long period of time. Trauma helps, in regards to the big 5, concienciousness is the easiest to change.

I’ve gotten downvoted every time I’ve come to the defense of Meyers Briggs on HN, so I’m happy to see a comment with more or less my view of it voted to the top for once.

I find it to be an extremely useful abstraction. Being honest with myself and really digging into how the cognitive functions “work” has been incredibly instructive and valuable in terms of further understanding myself. It’s a REALLY high level programming language, so if you want memory management, so to speak, you’ll be disappointed. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable.

You probably hit the wrong "bubble". This happens. Then there's the various groupthink fashions that come and go like weather patterns on various comment sites. I doubt HN is much different. Probably better on HN but I've seen some oddball voting patterns around BLM and similar.

This analogy breaks down though. High level languages can be slow or inefficient because they don’t map directly into reality, but they are still correct. MBTI and FFI just don’t really work at all ... they don’t predict much and if you took them too seriously as permanent traits you would make bad decisions.

> There was once a poll of engineers at the tech company I work at, and I think the results were like 70% INTJ, 25% INTP, and 5% other. If MBTI lacked all predictive power, you would expect a distribution roughly equivalent to that of the general population. Could people self-select what they "want" to be? Sure, but it's still predictive of something in that case.

I was once part of an accelerator that used the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument, which basically seemed like MBTI except with more fees. And it got very similar results for the engineers in the room. Introverted analysts.

And anecdotally, I know very few non INTJ engineers and the few that aren't are INTP (among those of us that have taken the test for career planning or personality testing for the workplace).

I get how it may not be a rigorous way to sort people, but I want some research on whether it at least clusters them.

Does that make the information actionable? Does being an INTJ allow a prediction on anything else other than being an INTJ?

What is the point in clustering them? If your team is 75% ravenclaw, 20% Hufflepuff and 5% other, how does that help? Are you going to go out and try to recruit a Slytherin?

What if your team is 45% Rachel, 15% Chandler, 20% Joey?

What benefit do you get from clustering people in this way?

You are spot on. I would suspect that everyone that I work with falling this cluster. You could sum us up as a bunch of nerdy engineers, and I don't think anyone would really take exception with that.

But it captures almost nothing except a very small range of behavior. We are very different people. 'Sally' lights up whenever she talks of her children, but mostly pines to be a librarian one day. we have cluster b people, we have Jokers and humorous people, perhaps a bit of Asperger's, adventurers and the meek, storytellers, partiers, tea totalers. One seems to live for firing people, another I'm pretty sure I cannot model another human mind. some of us paint, play music, others disdain that stuff. Jocks and couch potatoes.

Those that say they use the mtbi for self-understanding puzzle me, because it tells you nothing of any of these very human traits. knowing somebody has one of the cluster b traits for example tells you a lot about how you might need to modify your behavior to interact with them successfully in a work environment, and MB days nothing. I could go on and on on what it is not measuring.

Yeah we're engineers. I knew that. I didn't need the test.

In grad school I joined an extracurricular social society where you meet around a table with other grad students and discuss various topics selected in advance while eating pie and other goodies. Sort of like debate but without the structure or positions.

Anyway one time the topic was Myers Briggs and so we all filled out our profiles in advance so we'd have something to discuss.

It was a group of 20 people, and we discovered that 19 of us were INTJ. The other was INTP. That was when I decided the test has strong predictive power, for the same reason you did. Even if it's just able to predict a preference for discussing personality tests with a plate of cherry pie. INTJ has a background rate of about 2%.

Or INTJ is what you get when you answer questions in a way that you expect to be conforming to what your fellow grad students will respect, before going to a meeting and revealing your result to them.

No. That's a very clever and cynical viewpoint but realistically, none of us cared about that. It's not like these were peers in the same lab whose opinion mattered. Nor did anyone really have a strong opinion about meyers briggs categories. If anything it almost got a little embarassing after the first five replies to keep answering the same thing as the other people - like going to a restaurant and everyone ordering, one after the next, that they want the blueberry pancakes. You almost feel like an automaton instead of being a unique and creative individual.

Right, I didn't mean to imply that everyone was lying, I just think that wanting to fit in with a group is a strong subconscious drive in such situations.

Edit: I was curious and did a quick search what the scientific literature says about this, and it seems like it is an accepted problem, though there are techniques used to reduce the effects. To quote one study:

"Regarding the use of self-report personality inventories, meta-analytic results have indicated that applicants are able to, and actually do, deviate from honest responses in order to make a good impression (Alliger & Dwight, 2000; Viswesvaran & Ones, 1999). "

I read the book "What's Your Type?: The Story of the Myers-Briggs, and How Personality Testing Took Over the World" and learned it was a bit like Scientology a few decades ago.

Very secretive, offered a free personality test to lure you into lots of paid courses. They were selling courses to an astonishing percentage of large corporations.

There is no Church of Myers--Briggs, and no secrets. Everything is open.

There are charlatans in any field, and they will use anything. They all use money, but using money does not make you a charlatan. That corporate HR departments hire charlatans only demonstrates that HR departments will hire anybody willing to give the HR director a kickback.

I’ve always been amazed by how much of the self-development & improvement industry seems to be based off of Scientology!

My main criticism is it gives the impression the traits are bimodal when they're actually more modal, giving people the impression we're more dislike than similar.

I seem to recall seeing an MBTI result that showed a location on a quadrant for pairs of attributes? So you could see if you were really closer to or further from the origin. That might help with the false binary impression.

I thought all MBTI tests give you scores for each axis.

It does. And then people refer to themselves by four letter, read abour description of types by 4 letter and completely ignore the scale in it.

I've seen people call themselves xNTJ or INFx.

> It's not super predictive, but not to be honest, nothing else in psychology is either.

This is an often cited myth. Examples of psychological effects with high predictive powers include:

* The law of stimulus and response

* Priming

* Classical conditioning

* Reinforcement learning, which further includes positive reinforcement, punishment, etc.

* Plenty of neural models that predict behavioral anomalies after brain trauma.

* Plenty of social psychology models that predict how people behave inside groups.

* Heck even the linguist Noam Chomsky made an accurate psychological prediction based on cognitive psychology in how people acquire grammar.

I think you might be confusing psychology with psychometrics which is a sub-field of psychology which holds that any psychological effect is measurable and that operational definition is a good way to establish these effects. The whole field of psychometrics has a serious problem with predictive powers of their theories. Other modern fields of psychology on the other hand has a good track record of making theories that hold good predictive powers.

Something I wonder is if people within different occupations tend to interpret the questions differently. That would explain a trend in the results, unrelated to personality.

> people within different occupations tend to interpret the questions differently

There are also other types of ambiguity. For example when asking: "Do you keep your room in order?" - you might answer "yes" because that's what you do, but you only do it because it has been enforced into you over time, while if you were alone and free you'd keep it messy.

Do people respond with their instinctive reaction or with their trained reaction? Which one is the right answer? Depending on that you could get a different type.

There is even more ambiguity in questions like "Do you keep your room in order". First what order for some, is chaos for others. Second some people just lie to them self or ignore the truth. For example, how would a hoarder answer that question. So the self perception could differ much from the real behaviour.

Wouldn't the manner in which a person interprets questions be part of their personality, especially if that interpretation is consistent between e.g. high school and their time in industry (as mine was)?

Indeed that might be possible. In fact there may be sub categories within the popular categories with different behaviors, e.g., a poet whose symbol is INTJ might be a different personality than an engineer with the same symbol. This would be hard to sort out because there are vastly fewer poets than engineers.

Intelligence may play a role too. Two people with the same symbols but widely different intelligence may behave differently to the point where they are identified as having different personalities. I'm speaking broadly about intelligence without necessarily believing in IQ testing.

If the aim is to help conversation during a first date, as the post implies, then why not. If such an imprecise tool is used to determine your employability, or pay grade, or career path, or access to some vital services or housing, etc. then it's unacceptable.

The fact that HR professionals seem to love it is a strong indicator that it is bad and harmful.

The best that can be said of MBTI is that it has a slight correlation with one of the Big 5 dimensions. So it's not useless but it's close to useless. On the other hand it's expensive whereas the Big Five has been validated and it's free. Really MBTI is just a waste of time and money.

Not that correlation with Big 5 should be a determining factor, but...

The chart in the article shows that E/I is strongly correlated with extraversion, S/N is strongly correlated with openness, T/F is moderately correlated with agreeableness (and weakly with conscientiousness), and J/P is moderately correlated with conscientiousness (and weakly with openness).

It's not a slight correlation, so if MBTI is useless then so is Big 5. Again though, choosing Big 5 as the standard is arbitrary and unfair. That automatically judges all other systems as inferior, without examining their merit.

Only one of the two systems stands up to modern standards of psychological science. If you are an HR rep and you want to predict an applicant’s job performance, you are using inferior data if you choose an MBTI test. It may have other uses, like fostering a useful discussion during an interview, but there is a very real case in which it is inferior and 5-factor personality is the standard to be judged against.

If you place any weight on Ffi in recruitment you are also doing it wrong though. The studies reporting ffi correlations with real world outcomes give confidence intervals not prediction intervals. For individual cases it’s mostly just noise.

There's two main personality tests.

Big 5 is preferred by scientists. MBTI is preferred by people who are taking it to see which famous person (or fictional character) allegedly has the same personality.

The problem isn't just the test, it's the whole culture around MBTI. Yes, the test measures something, but you're not just getting a test, you're also getting a bunch of information on how to interpret the test.

You can always spot someone who takes MBTI seriously because they talk about introversion meaning they "lose energy by spending time with others and need to recharge by spending time alone".

Really? I certainly don't take MBTI seriously, but I use that as a rough definition of introversion.

Here is some potential to construct a personality meta-test: If you prefer Big 5 to MBTI, you are introverted; if you prefer MBTI to Big 5, you are extraverted. If you prefer either of them to horoscope, you are... blah blah blah... if you think all tests are problematic, you are judging; and if you are afraid you would fail at all of them, you are neurotic.

Agree completely, everything has to start from somewhere. Often it is a false start with nothing to gain. While MBTI was a small step, at least it was a forward step to better understanding vs the example you mentioned, "horoscopes", which past the fleeting interest into astronomy is just walking off a cliff into the void.

Scientific studies support the Big 5 or Hexaco model of personality. Sticking with MBTI is the same as saying the earth is flat despite evidence to the contrary. MBTI was not created Jung. But my two fans of Jung. There is a huge difference.

> Could people self-select what they "want" to be? Sure, but it's still predictive of something in that case.

Why would measuring self-selection be a good thing, why would that be a reason to use MBTI in your book, rather than a reason to avoid it? If it does measure self-selection, then what is the function or purpose of the test?

> I've never really understood the harsh criticisms of MBTI. It's not super predictive, but not to be honest, nothing else in psychology is either

The way psychologists see it, "this is much worst then usual uncertainity for many reasons".

Also, psychology and pop psychology are two different things.

Yeah, horoscopes are fun. I used to mess with my school by shuffling the horoscopes in the weekly newsletter. No one noticed or complained.

The purpose of horoscopes is to keep people from doing the same thing every day. It doesn't matter which sign you check, or even if you check the same one each time.

So, scrambling them did not interfere with what people used them for. There was no reason for anyone to complain. The astro-BS just randomizes assignments, so everybody doesn't all get the same advice at the same time.

You have spent years feeling smug, but the joke was on you all along.

I felt quite good actually both then and now. But you seem angrier than you should be. Certainly angrier than someone who would have wrote "It doesn't matter which sign you check" and actually meant it.

You interpreted them as being angry, but I think they were just laughing at you.

I am laughing at the mystery of existence. None of us have anything to be smug about, but we can laugh about it. Have to, really.

Accusations of being smug are usually made by people who chose a team and you've encroached or offended that team somehow. There's often an aspect of admonishment in using that word as well.

As for my part it wasn't based on arrogance as you'd likely expect. It was simply the result of a bet. I won that bet since no one noticed.

Obviously no one would ever notice.

Horoscopes are the archetypal example of a thing that doesn't matter. "Filler" is the newpaper term, also said of the stories laid out between the ads (which weren't). Nowadays we say "content".

Winning didn't mean you were any smarter than average; the other guy was an idiot. But despite horoscopes being maximally random before they got to you, to which you therefore added exactly none, they have a purpose and a valid use that you failed to perceive, year after year, since. I don't use them; but people who do are not, thereby, wrong.

So, your smugness is a case of imagining yourself smarter than you turned out to be. In life, few will explain your mistakes to you so carefully.

Obviously? I don't think this is true. People pay money for horoscopes and similar so there are people out there who take it seriously. I don't.

I didn't say anyone was an idiot. That's from you. Likely because you're offended. More than you probably should be. But thats your choice. If you think horoscopes are great then keep using them.

I swapped the horoscopes around for a bet. No one noticed. Its ancient history. I won the bet. Already been paid. Already spent it.

You can't change anything here. Now you're just online trolling.

If you imagine me offended, you are wrong a third time. Or fifth, I might have lost count.

It should worry you to be wrong so frequently about other people. But I prognosticate that nothing will change.

... and again with the trolling.

QED

> There was once a poll of engineers at the tech company I work at, and I think the results were like 70% INTJ, 25% INTP, and 5% other. If MBTI lacked all predictive power, you would expect a distribution roughly equivalent to that of the general population.

You're assuming the types are proportionally represented in the general population, which we have no reason the believe even if the test works as advertised. For all we know urban environments are 70% INTJ.

> For all we know urban environments are 70% INTJ.

There are 16 categories, which means you'd expect about 6% in each if the test sorts evenly. It doesn't; in fact only between 2% and 3% of the population is INTJ. Unless one of the questions is literally "are you a tech worker", that's very conspicuous selectivity.

On the other hand, a test with questions like 'are you a tech worker' might be a lot shorter and just as meaningful!

The test doesn't sort evenly. One of the most popular online test sites says in one of their descriptions - I forget which one - that "this is the rarest type with only x% of the population."

I had a female friend who was an INTJ, and told me that it was very rare among women. Being very, INTJ, she was referencing some rigorous statistics.

Yes, I mentioned in the next line that it doesn't sort evenly, and INTJ is particularly a minority.

INTJ is 2.1% of the population

https://personalitymax.com/personality-types/population-gend...

my big criticism is that they’re taken as constants, when they can be highly dynamic quantities in different contexts. that’s what makes personality types misleading and not that useful in real life (i.e., not very predictive).

Being predictive of something is the beef here. There is no sound theory of what that something is and what specifically it would predict.

Binning people into excel rows by an arbitrary process is one of the hallmarks of either a pseudoscientific hoax, or an entertaining but scientifically unremarkable party game.

You might as well divide people into Hogswarts houses by a similar test and it would serve similar purpose.

In other words, it's a pastime driven by fictional representation of human psyche. Some groups may find this exercise fun.

But this is no reason to stop hating Meyers-Brigs given it's driven by psedoscientific marketing. While it might not be harmful, it totally is a similar type of activity like homeopathy.

> I've never really understood the harsh criticisms of MBTI. It's not super predictive [...]

I think the problem might be that people are using it to 'predict' things.

> Myers-Briggs

Wikipedia will give you a lot of references to research as to why this is not considered science (or even science-adjacent).

Anecdotally, I have been subjected to these (or something very similar at least) as a condition of employment. It was so incredibly transparent that I chose a personality at the outset and 'achieved' that outcome.

Check the math in the article. (the correlation tables especially, both against the "Big 5" and for repeatability) If Myers-Briggs is not science, then the "Big 5" personality traits are also not science. They are tied together, each strongly predictive of the other. Results are repeatable, especially if not rounded to boolean values.

I'm going to suggest a hypothetical. Let's ignore any personality test specifics just to generalize.

Ok, so I have a candidate for a position, who shows +5% to "conscientiousness". What does that mean, practically, for me as an employer? It means exactly nothing, because that trait is so vague as to be ... meaningless. (That's just the start of the problems with these tests.)

Even if it M-B (or whatever) is a repeatable effect it has no value as a predictor of performance of a single individual. In aggregate, maybe... (but also no, see the wiki).

It's just people playing Management Consultant extracting money from Management.

Imagine you have a job that is highly detail-oriented. Perhaps data must be perfect or a number of steps must be followed but checking the employee's work might be cumbersome.

You have two applicants, roughly equal. One scores higher on conscientiousness ...

Do you believe that measurement is actually accurate?

Well, we were discussing the utility of such a test. I would assume that by the time we got to the point of utility, we would have agreed that the thing itself was valid. There's no point in discussing the utility of a thing that didn't work.

For somebody who admits having no idea what it's for, you seem awfully confident of your opinion.

> For somebody who admits having no idea what it's for

I'm sorry, what?

I did ask that as a rhetorical flourish in a different thread (as a response to you, in fact), but c'mon. You specifically said

> It's not science, or science-adjacent, or anything to do with science. It doesn't pretend to be. That's not what it's for.

I note that you didn't answer my other question: how do you justify its use if it's not 'science'.

EDIT: Btw, my allusion was to a comment by Stephen Fry in a debate. (Specifics are no doubt going to lead to more contention, so I'll omit them.)

Some people insist science=good, therefore not-science=not-good. But the world is bigger than that.

Your responsibility as a human is to discover value in things you encounter. Failing to find it is just failing, and says more about you than about things.

Please don't cross into personal attack in HN threads. It's not what this site is for, and wrecks what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I am not attacking anyone, personally or otherwise. What I wrote applies to anybody, myself included.

Please stop.

It's not science, or science-adjacent, or anything to do with science. It doesn't pretend to be. That's not what it's for.

You can always lie, about anything you like. You can put salt in the sugar bowl. You can substitute decaf in for the coffee at the office, and give everybody caffeine-withdrawl headaches. You can have your dog crap in the sandbox at the park. What do you imagine you would prove, by that? (I give you exactly one guess.)

All you did lying on the test was to land in a different box than if you had not lied. But one box is not better than another box, so what good did that do? It means somebody who looks and believes it will find it harder to communicate with you. What you achieved was to throw sand in the gears. Congratulations.

>> But one box is not better than another box, so what good did that do?

If one box was "you get the job" and the other was "rejected" -- I can see why people would lie to achieve one result or another.

That's a problem with using any personality test for hiring. Not just MBTI.

> All you did lying on the test was to land in a different box than if you had not lied.

Again, which is why I mentioned in my post that there are scientific problems with the field as a whole, so I don’t understand the undue targeting of MBTI compared to everything else. You realize people are prescribed or not prescribed controlled substances on the basis of their responses to other questionnaires, right? You can look up the DSM criteria and get a diagnosis for just about anything based on your responses.

Anybody using MB to choose how and whether to prescribe controlled substances is engaging in malpractice and should have their license revoked, post-haste, and probably should be incarcerated besides.

That said, the DSM has its own problems.

> That's not what it's for.

But what is it for then?

> It's not science, or science-adjacent, or anything to do with science. It doesn't pretend to be. That's not what it's for.

Ok, so what is it for? And how do you justify its use?

I've seen what it's being sold for/as.

If you do not see it how it would be useful, my recommendation is do not buy it.

I have not bought it, but I have used it. I justify using it because it is useful to me: It helps me understand how people very different from myself interact with their world. These other people are not wrong, just different. Remarkably often, the differences are quite comprehensible. It helps to organize those differences. The precise details of how to organize them are not especially important, because it is just a way to break up what would be a lot of confusing detail into chunks that minds can grasp more easily. If it matches how other people organize, then we can talk about it.

Certain ways of organizing differences satisfy more criteria than others, and so have attracted more people to use them. MB is one that does, and so has. That doesn't make other systems wrong; and that other systems exist doesn't make MB wrong, even if different systems are more useful in one place than another.

If the purpose is merely to understand how people different from you view the world, then why take the test at all, rather than just reading about the ~sixteen personality types MBTI distinguishes between? The MBTI consultant who administered the test to me couldn't answer that question.

Consultants are a whole other animal: astrologers willing to give HR directors kickbacks. What they say, or can't, is not informative.

If just reading the descriptions is enough for you, do that. Most people seem to need more structure.

I don't need to take the test to know which box I'm in. But I do need other people to take it, to know which box they fit in. Is this really hard to understand?

If I've worked with someone for three years, shouldn't I have discovered how to work with them along the way already?

Maybe, someday, you will have to work with somebody new.

Maybe somebody who could never in a million years do what you do, but finds things easy that you could never do. You could hope they are better at figuring out how to communicate with very different people than you are. Or, you could learn it yourself. It turns out not to be so hard, with the right tools. MB is one. It's not the only one, and not the best for any particular thing, but it's quick and easy to pick up.

Some people find it helps them understand themselves better. And people usually want to understand people they're close to or work with.

>Some people find it helps them understand themselves better.

Some people have said the same of astrological signs. (EDIT: As per @simias' comment on confirmation bias. This is why "text blurb profile"-oriented reasoning is especially suspect. We already have ample evidence of that reasoning being as unreliable guide to truth as is unreliable a belief that your birthday determines your personality.)

MBTI results correlate moderately to strongly with Big 5 scores. Is Big 5 equivalent to astrology too?

These are answers to a standardized test. So, they are (probably) teasing out some tiny kernel of truth in the distribution of (probably context sensitive) human traits (insofar as these traits are related to the questions, but probably more dubiously insofar as people use English words like "intuitive" for axes or name one axis two different English ideas like Judging and Perceiving).

Honestly, the more "words" you add to try to summarize a pile of question answers, the further away you are getting from "science" and the closer you get to astrology. If there is only one lesson I can convey here, it should be that. The science is the 50 or however many questions dimensional questionnaire and the 4 or 5 dimensional distributional summary of the full high dimensional distribution. You project "down from the questions" to the summary and then people using English "back project" but are mostly just filling in poetic detail from anecdotal experience. The bigger that back projection to paragraphs and chapters the more like astrology or psychology by and for poets things have become.

However, as mentioned a couple of times, these summaries may be telling you very little (not "probably says" as you say a few times, but "probably says nothing") about the 99% neurotypical people (yes, my estimate is hand-wavy based on the distribution along just one axis from the article which says the other are "similar"). The tests may be only useful to identify outlying personality extremes which is very much not how amateurs apply them. Amateurs overconclude..reading profiles and basically acting out the epistemological play of astrology over again (but backed by "science" so they feel less guilty; EDIT - and yes I have known several such people in real life).

Incidentally, this also explains "correlations" with other things (like IQ or engineers or etc.) because linear statistics like correlation are notoriously dragged around by outliers. To whatever extent these things are true, the correlations (unadjusted for individual noise as already mentioned) will have much weaker statistical power than you would naively expect. In effect, your sample size may be only 0.2% to a few % what you thought it was. So, instead of 1000s of people you have 10s with thin population of each of the 16 categories. This would show up in the reproducibility of the correlation studies, but honestly require a more careful meta-analysis than I am prepared to offer for free. So, these studies, too, may have a grain of truth, but perhaps only a grain and this grain is probably much smaller than what personality test advocates in this comment thread seem to understand.

At least one real world problem with taking these measurements too seriously is, as others in this thread have mentioned, that these thinly evidenced divisions - even if real - can be as ripe for abuse as race/whatever designator is. In-group preference [1] is a strongly replicated result in psychology. This is another reason why axes-only "a% I, b% N, c% T, d% P" are better than classification, and why the big 5 (which at least resists categories) is less harmful. a +- A, b +- B, etc. would be even better.

Have you or anyone on this whole thread ever heard of a p-value for your personality assignment or error bars on your personality axes before I mentioned them? (Yes, I know the problems with p-values. Those problems are not the point here.) No? Yet everyone has heard of same-person reproducibility problems. These are obviously deeply related issues.

So, the problem is not that "MB is totally not science". It's that personality measurement in general is weak enough science to be far more likely to be misapplied than to be correctly understood, especially by lay practitioners like HR depts/mgmt/people on first dates/people in emotionally heated scenarios. It may have a real and even positive role in diagnosing true outlier children in need of interventions, though "profiles" of all the super extreme 16 cases will probably sound bad and may be obvious sans any testing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-group_favoritism