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In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

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Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#151

Post by enkid »

singingfish wrote: post #145
smokey_circles wrote: post #75

I don't know how/why people defend this test. 1. It's inaccurate. And that's not just "technically true", it's very rare that the test reproduces results. 2. Jung's theories (the ones used in the test) aren't just "controversial". They're wrong. He says it himself, in the same document they used to create the test. It is just a cash cow now. The _biggest_ problem with the test is it is harmful, not helpful. People be…

You have good points there. From reading the article, the inaccuracy is by inappropriately classifying people into groups, and the groupings lack sensitivity. As you also point out the underlying theoretical framework is also wrong. The article does point out that the Myers Briggs does correlate reasonably well with four of the big 5 though. Having said that I would definitely discourage use of the Myers-Briggs. The…

So IQ measures something, but we don't know what and we don't know how it impacts the real world. How can we meaningfully say it measures something then?

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#152

Post by wombatmobile »

Myers Briggs is popular for the same reason astrology is popular. People like categorising personalities so they can generalise about behaviours and "understand" people better by associating them with a pigeon hole.

What is innovative about Myers Briggs is that it isn't limited like the horoscope by date of birth. If you want to be identified as a certain type, with Myers Briggs, all you have to do is answer the questions in a certain frame of mind. Contrast this agility with the rigidness of the horoscope, which requires the falsification of a birth certificate to change categories.

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#153

Post by leto_ii »

I've always had mixed feelings regarding the Myres-Briggs test.

On the one hand I was surprised by its consistency - in my case, every time I take it (regardless of the implementation), I get the same result. This probably comes down to a combination of me sort of being able to anticipate what a question is about and the test's genuine descriptive power.

On the other hand, like pretty much everything psychology-related, this test feels like it's trying to impose a relatively simplistic order onto an area that we don't understand properly. I have a similar impression of the big five personality traits, as well as of the descriptions of pathologies in the DSM.

I think at the end of the day the Myers-Briggs and the Big Five probably have quite a bit of overlap. At their core they seem to describe personalities via a number of principal components or latent variables that differ a bit between the two models, but capture about the same amount of information.

> The great advantage of the the MBTI is exactly that it makes everyone feel like a beautiful special snowflake. The axes are chosen and named ingeniously so as to make them easy to reveal.

Considering that both models are hand-wavey borderline pseudo-science, I agree that the Myers-Briggs is the more palatable of the two.

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#155

Post by tsimionescu »

0x737368 wrote: post #146
mudita wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's hear it from a psychologist: "If you don’t buy IQ research, you might as well throw out all the rest of psychology." (Jordan Peterson) https://youtu.be/D7Kn5p7TP_Y?t=2938 For anybody interested in personality research, I warmly recommend this lecture series, by the way. These are the basics, which psychology students learn at university.

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Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#156

Post by Twisol »

enkid wrote: post #151
singingfish wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have good points there. From reading the article, the inaccuracy is by inappropriately classifying people into groups, and the groupings lack sensitivity. As you also point out the underlying theoretical framework is also wrong. The article does point out that the Myers Briggs does correlate reasonably well with four of the big 5 though. Having said that I would definitely discourage use of the Myers-Briggs. The…

So IQ measures something, but we don't know what and we don't know how it impacts the real world. How can we meaningfully say it measures something then?

Without having a horse in a race, it's probably the idea that the results persist between multiple tests and vary by who's taking the test. Persistence seems like a decent lower standard to say that there's _something_ present, even if you're not quite sure what it is.

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#158

Post by Twisol »

concordDance wrote: post #149
fsloth wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can bin people in any number of arbitrary ways. Just the fact you can bin people does not make the binning usefull. Meyers-Squid is equally valid as any other fiction driven binning process. Like dividing people into Hogswarts houses. Stability alone is useless if the predictive qualities do not extend beyond the binning process. Being INTJ only predicts the next time you do the test (if the scoring is stable) yo…

Are you really saying that testing as intj (for example) doesn't correlate with anything? Because that seems incredibly unlikely. E.g. three years ago Slate Star Codex readers were surveyed and found to be 10 times more likely to be INTJ/INTP than the general population.

Not particularly having a horse in this race, if a theory can't reliably make useful predictions, it's not a very useful theory. There's certainly something to be said about identifying correlations, but it isn't yet clear to me whether we can draw inferences based on those correlations to make useful predictions.

In the SSC example, I wouldn't be especially shocked if there are no useful inferences in either direction, but rather a confounding variable that makes it more likely for SSC readers to answer MBTI answers in a particular way. MBTI itself wouldn't necessarily have a lot to say about this factor. (And given the intellectual, self-aware content of SSC, it seems pretty likely to me that this is the case.)

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#159

Post by wizzwizz4 »

souprock wrote: post #110
smokey_circles wrote: post #75

I don't know how/why people defend this test. 1. It's inaccurate. And that's not just "technically true", it's very rare that the test reproduces results. 2. Jung's theories (the ones used in the test) aren't just "controversial". They're wrong. He says it himself, in the same document they used to create the test. It is just a cash cow now. The _biggest_ problem with the test is it is harmful, not helpful. People be…

The article covers reproducibility. The test does reliably reproduce results, at least if you don't quantize to boolean. Jung doesn't matter. Being a cash cow doesn't matter. There is nothing in the field of psychology with better support than IQ. If you aren't going to accept IQ, then you've entirely tossed out the field of psychology. There is nothing left.

> There is nothing in the field of psychology with better support than IQ.

This is not true. See Wikipedia[0][1][2].

IQ actually holds little support, compared with (e.g.) bilateral sound recognition, or somatotopic arrangement on the postcentral gyrus. (Among psychologists, that is; IQ probably has more support amongst the general population, because it's pop-pseudoscience.)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_race_and_intell...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#IQ_testi...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Validity...

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#160

Post by feanaro »

feanaro wrote: post #113
souprock wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article covers reproducibility. The test does reliably reproduce results, at least if you don't quantize to boolean. Jung doesn't matter. Being a cash cow doesn't matter. There is nothing in the field of psychology with better support than IQ. If you aren't going to accept IQ, then you've entirely tossed out the field of psychology. There is nothing left.

> There is nothing in the field of psychology with better support than IQ. If you aren't going to accept IQ, then you've entirely tossed out the field of psychology. There is nothing left. Huh. That's quite a bold and incorrect claim. Are you a psychologist?

Thank you for the reactionary downvotes, but how about making an actual argument?

(self-reply because I can no longer edit the comment)

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