What isn't touched upon are the descriptions of the various attributes in mbti. Because each of those is a bit questionable. Like can't you be both thinking and feeling. Maybe according to the test you can't but that doesn't intuitively follow from those descriptions. That's why I like big five more. It just slaps you in the face with how bad your personality is.
In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)
51–60 of 352 posts
Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)
#52I find it amazing that anyone uses it in the business world. Next up HR will be adding tarrot cards and oiji boards Then again I find it amazing that anyone uses it at all. It's complete trash
Would you please stop posting shallow dismissals and calling names in HN comments? Posts like this and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26289644 are not what this site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: we've had to ask you this sort of thing a ton of times. Eventually we ban such accounts. If you wouldn't mind reviewing the guidelines and taking the intended spirit of the site more to…
"we've had to ask you this sort of thing a ton of times. Eventually we ban such accounts"
No you haven't. What's wrong with calling out bad products for what they are?
Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)
#53I'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 whole field is just not anywhere near the level of physics or chemistry (not to blame the researchers; predicting humans is very hard). The big 5 and I think more recently an 18 dimensional breakdown (using PCA or ICA?) just aren't that much better than MBTI, despite ma…
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.
Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 repeata…
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 ...
Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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.
Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)
#56I took M-B test and was surprised how accurate it was in describing my personality type. I suspect my personality traits are closer to endpoints of its scales, making it more precise for me.
Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)
#58I'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 whole field is just not anywhere near the level of physics or chemistry (not to blame the researchers; predicting humans is very hard). The big 5 and I think more recently an 18 dimensional breakdown (using PCA or ICA?) just aren't that much better than MBTI, despite ma…
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.
Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. I…
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…
>> 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.
Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)
#60I'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 whole field is just not anywhere near the level of physics or chemistry (not to blame the researchers; predicting humans is very hard). The big 5 and I think more recently an 18 dimensional breakdown (using PCA or ICA?) just aren't that much better than MBTI, despite ma…
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).