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

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

#291

Post by imagist » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 7:13 PM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #243

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment works surprisingly well like this: 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…

There are a lot of worthless measures we use out there. Body Mass Index (BMI) is another one. This scale was developed in the mid 1800s and you can do a simple search to find tons of criticism on it. If you're overweight/obese, you will have a high BMI, but not everyone with high BMI is overweight (especially if you're very tall or very short). Measuring Cholesterol is another one, since you can't actually change cho…

> There are a lot of worthless measures we use out there. Body Mass Index (BMI) is another one. This scale was developed in the mid 1800s and you can do a simple search to find tons of criticism on it. If you're overweight/obese, you will have a high BMI, but not everyone with high BMI is overweight (especially if you're very tall or very short).

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.

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

#292

Post by INTPenis » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 7:13 PM UTC

I thought the MBTI was fun because it made me feel better about myself.

It didn't actually solve anything though.

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

#293

Post by static_noise » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 7:16 PM UTC

gh1 wrote: post #82

This article is as unscientific as it claims the Myers-Briggs test to be. It does not prove the Myers-Briggs test wrong, but instead claims that there is no evidence to support it. Well, in science, if you want to claim that something is wrong, you need two things: the theory must be falsifiable and you need to falsify it. Just claiming something has no evidence is not enough. Some more critique on the article. 1. Th…

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, correct. Some theory that has not been tested, however, is equally pointless. Unfortunately we're opertating in a space here where it's more an economy of attention than hard scientific discourse which is very hard to attain in that field. You seem on the right track, though.

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

#294

Post by milkmiruku » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 7:18 PM UTC

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #234

whitehouse3 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that doesn't work at all. OP is saying that he draws conclusions about someone's personality based on the Meyers-Briggs type with which they identify. That logic doesn't apply to the zodiac because your star-sign is based on your birthday. People don't lie about their birthday to become a Virgo. But they might fudge the answers to the Meyers-Briggs survey so they appear more "introverted" and "thinking". If you c…

That logic doesn't apply to the zodiac 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 pr…

maybe it's easier to be existential over essential with Myers-Briggs style systems? less rooted in the stars, though i guess overall humanity is now in a position to be getting smart about mixing and matching which references and metaphors work and which don't, depending on context. all abstractions are leaky, though it's easier with some to frame a flow of change.

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

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

#295

Post by sunstone » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 7:26 PM UTC

Against stupidity the Gods themselves contend in vain.

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

#296

Post by Kunix » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 7:33 PM UTC

Bartweiss wrote: post #154

Kunix wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal of the test is just to give an approximation. The test is not accurate (and is not claiming to be). 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…

I think there's a cross-purposes argument happening here. 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 educ…

Agreeing 100% with you.

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

#297

Post by dang » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 7:40 PM UTC

kjbflsudfb wrote: post #289

You know what kind of responses you are asking for without adding: /s ? :)

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12687196 and marked it off-topic.

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

#298

Post by projektir » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 7:51 PM UTC

Last time I read about Myers-Briggs, I got the impression that it was to be used strictly for self-assessment and not externally, and I recall the article I was reading specifically saying that the test only makes sense for personal use because it was too easy to game otherwise...

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

#299

Post by mordocai » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 7:56 PM UTC

personlurking wrote: post #144

mordocai wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, I'm right on the E/I border and pretty strongly test one way in the other categories so I just say i'm barely an I and then NTJ.

I believe this is classified as an "x" within the MBTI community, where x means on the border.

So xNTJ? Cool

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

#300

Post by nostrademons » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 8:00 PM UTC

Here's the correlations between MBTI dimensions and the "big five" personality traits that are commonly used in social-sciences research:

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

When I look at those, I think "Not everything, but not nothing either". A correlation of 0.7+ is pretty high for anything in the social sciences - by comparison, the correlation between intelligence and genetics is about 0.4. It's certainly a lot higher than astrology, which has a correlation of roughly 0.0 with anything other than birthdate.

A lot of the criticism of MBTI is that it breaks people down into 16 arbitrary categories, and there's no way a single category can reflect everything about a person. This is true; there is no way a single category will reflect everything about a person. But we break people down into arbitrary categories all the time - race, social class, profession, job title, political party, ethnicity, place of residence, generation, etc. Categorization by MBTI brings all of the pitfalls of these - you're stereotyping, and you're going to miss important details about the person themself - as well as all the benefits, in the form of a quick mental shorthand to draw inferences about their future behavior on little data.

You can think of it in "Thinking fast and slow" terms: MBTIs and other social categories are in the "thinking fast" category, where you make quick but error-prone judgments on limited information, while actually getting to know someone is the "thinking slow" side, where you get a much more accurate picture of who they are at the cost of significantly higher effort. Indeed, the MBTI has a dimension for this (iNtuitive vs. Sensing), and I've found that online MBTI tests tend to overrepresent the number of Ns in the population compared to offline, professionally-given tests, because Ns tend to be more attracted to the MBTI as a way of thinking about the world.