The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless • Hacker News Board

Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless

#181

Post by amelius » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 4:09 PM UTC

eivarv wrote: post #168

amelius wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strictly speaking you are right, my logic was flawed (hidden assumption). But let's stick with the orignal issue here, which is whether the test is predictive.

Agreed - this is why I asked whether there is any proof of its alleged predictive power. Without this, I don't think it's reasonable to assume that it is in fact predictive.

Yes, but the point I'm trying to make is that the claim that any test has zero predicitive power is actually pretty bold.

For example, the simple test of whether a user clicks a certain link or not already has predicitive power (companies are using this, fruitfully). So a more sophisticated test like MBTI certainly has some predictive power.

Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless

#182

Post by Karunamon » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 4:10 PM UTC

ebbv wrote: post #131

n-exploit wrote: post #24

As an individual (INFJ) thoroughly interested in Myers-Briggs, I often see this discussion brought up. As a short rebuttal, I feel as though many of those who tout Myers-Briggs as a comprehensive personality test fail to understand what the Myers-Briggs 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 (…

Your assertion that it is good for anything is based on the idea that the data is valid in any way. It isn't. When people are retested the results are very inconsistent. Results being independently reproducible is the foundation of science. Meyers-Briggs fails that simple metric.

If the test is judging mindset, something that changes very regularly, of course the results will change as well. This is akin to saying testing blood sugar is worthless because the result varies throughout the day.

Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless

#183

Post by Simon321 » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 4:12 PM UTC

jfoutz wrote: post #45

n-exploit wrote: post #24

As an individual (INFJ) thoroughly interested in Myers-Briggs, I often see this discussion brought up. As a short rebuttal, I feel as though many of those who tout Myers-Briggs as a comprehensive personality test fail to understand what the Myers-Briggs 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 (…

That is a completely reasonable approach. Like astrology or tarot cards. Getting people thinking about big questions in a non threatening way can spark interesting conversations. There are a lot of cultural norms that prevent people from talking about themselves in that kind of way. A little hocus pocus can help cut through that. In that same spirit alcohol is a pretty great social lubricant. A little bit of booze lo…

It's much more than 'astrology or tarot cards'. MBTI correlates with the big five personality traits. Which are backed up scientifically.

Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless

#184

Post by dragonwriter » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 4:13 PM UTC

Bartweiss wrote: post #52

n-exploit wrote: post #24

As an individual (INFJ) thoroughly interested in Myers-Briggs, I often see this discussion brought up. As a short rebuttal, I feel as though many of those who tout Myers-Briggs as a comprehensive personality test fail to understand what the Myers-Briggs 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 (…

My primary concern with even cursory usage of Myers-Briggs is that retest consistency isn't as high as I'd like. Plenty of people retest very solidly, of course, but there's a large-percentage chunk of the population that walks or more boundaries and doesn't put up consistent tests. That makes it hard to say anything about the results, at least in simple "my type" terms. A nuanced discussion would probably accept tha…

The big problem of MBTI is the axes aren't well aligned with supportable dimensions of personality, though they have some correlation with them. Models like EPQ (3 factors), Big Five (5 factors), and HEXACO (6 factors) have better methodology behind them (though each still has strengths and weaknesses).

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

Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless

#185

Post by cazum » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 4:14 PM UTC

0xfffafaCrash wrote: post #143

cazum wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You bring up an interesting case I think even you failed to consider: Since mbti essentially neuters it's own usefulness in the "round those percentages down to binary" stage, you could end up with a situation where an INTP and an ESFJ have only an 8% total difference in mbti-measured personality between them.

Oh absolutely. In fact I think there are those situations. My argument isn't that MBTI is effective in all individual cases to gauge much about them. My argument is that the ineffectiveness of MBTI at providing useful information to people on average has not been established. It's not been well researched in the first place and the research I've seen has been quite awful in their setup and analysis. The question isn'…

Well, since we know that 50% of people score different types upon retaking the test, that should be enough to identify the prevalence of these problem.

As for signal-to-noise, mbti is a useful tool for measuring the traits it measures, it just, for some reason, cuts the signal in half by removing the percentage from the label.

Without the percentages, you can never assume a persons traits don't hover at that middle ground. And thus, can never assume any part of their label is accurate.

If the occurrence of these hover cases were more like <4%, I'd be more inclined to agree with its usefulness, but as it is right now, the 4bit label, on its own, is just noise.

Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless

#186

Post by heisenbit » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 4:15 PM UTC

"SMARTNEWS"

"The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless"

promises explosive insights such as:

"[...] and statistical analysis reveals even data produced by the test shows a normal distribution rather than bimodal, refuting the either/or claims of the MBTI."

It is really surprising that aggregation of a number of binary questions results produces a normal distribution. In all my experiments with a randomly selected coin from my purse I got something close to bimodal - not.

MBTI may be flawed, overused and too simplistic. However simplifying statistical arguments down to that level is not the way to advance science.

Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless

#187

Post by lmm » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 4:15 PM UTC

chx wrote: post #152

lmm wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which notably do correlate closely with Myers-Briggs traits, so if you believe the one is meaningful then so is the other.

The primary problem with Myers-Briggs, besides the four traits not at all correlating with the big five is the test itself because it's binary. Correlations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi... 0.44 / -0.49 is not correlation.

The test measures a scale. Reporting the result as binary is indeed extremely misleading.

Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless

#188

Post by taco_emoji » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 4:19 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #119

AlexandrB wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's meaningless unless you confirm that their fitness for that task was actually correlated to their MTBI, e.g. by mixing those "fit" and "unfit" (based on MTBI) on the same task and comparing their performance. I'm pretty sure most companies don't do this. They just assume MTBI has predictive power and use it anyway since it gives them something to go on besides gut instinct.

Well, I know for sure that a person with an INTJ personality type is not suited for marketing and sales (statistically speaking of course). Would you claim otherwise?

How do you know that?

Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless

#189

Post by maverick_iceman » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 4:19 PM UTC

0xfffafaCrash wrote: post #143

cazum wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You bring up an interesting case I think even you failed to consider: Since mbti essentially neuters it's own usefulness in the "round those percentages down to binary" stage, you could end up with a situation where an INTP and an ESFJ have only an 8% total difference in mbti-measured personality between them.

Oh absolutely. In fact I think there are those situations. My argument isn't that MBTI is effective in all individual cases to gauge much about them. My argument is that the ineffectiveness of MBTI at providing useful information to people on average has not been established. It's not been well researched in the first place and the research I've seen has been quite awful in their setup and analysis. The question isn'…

>ineffectiveness of MBTI at providing useful information to people on average has not been established

Don't invert the burden of proof. It's up to the proponents of MBTI to demonstrate its effectiveness.

Re: The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Pretty Much Meaningless

#190

Post by taco_emoji » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 4:21 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #175

foopityfop wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I would. Given the inconsistency of results that the Myers-Briggs test outputs for individuals, the personality of that person who tested as an INTJ could be far from it normally. Furthermore, your willingness to buy into the narrative (and others' willingness to also believe it) that by categorizing certain people into stereotypes and assuming that most of these people tend to excel at a particular set of tasks…

Then please point me to the research, because the article does a lousy job at it. Saying that any profiling technique has zero predictive value is a very bold claim. Even one's astrological sign has predictive value: [1]. And yes, this has been scientifically proven. [1] http://www.medicaldaily.com/how-birth-month-influences-perso...

Why is it the job of the skeptic to prove that a profiling technique does not have predictive power? Shouldn't you have to prove that it does?