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In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

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Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#291

Post by nicoburns »

fsloth wrote: post #279
nicoburns wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like to see it as an as-yet poorly evidenced scientific hypothesis rather than an pseudo-scientific "fact". Which indeed may need to go through further revisions before the correct version is found. But I see lots of circumstantial evidence which makes me think it is worthy of further investigation.

Lots of good fiction feels profound. Good fiction feels right and true. But feeling right does not turn the fiction into science.

Sure, but neither does a lack of evidence mean that something isn't true. It's not science currently. But that doesn't mean it won't be (nor does it mean it will be).

I think you'd be surprised at how many scientific breakthroughs have come from individuals being bloody minded about things that everyone else thought were ridiculous. Science isn't just about testing hypothesis. The other part of it is about generating hypothesis to test. That part tends to be a lot more fluffy and subjective, but it's just as critical to the scientific process.

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#292

Post by jplr8922 »

leblancfg wrote: post #35
jplr8922 wrote: post #22

I took the MBTI in my early twenties, then forgot about it. I got into the much more scientific big-5 to understand different types of personalities, and in order to flesh out the possible ranges of behaviors in my mind. Then 10 years later I find myself going back to the MBTI. Why? Because I now understand it as a gateway to Jung ideas, which I find helpful during my current period of professional questionning. Acor…

jplr9822, I just wanted to say thanks for this great reply, and that I would thoroughly enjoy reading an expanded version of this in long form. Cheers

Gee I'm far from being a specialist.

Best gateway I found to MBTI as a tool for personal development (and not self masturbation) is the personality hacker podcast (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5S23Z7_qa4sRnfW80Xd6Ag). Keep in mind that the MBTI is not a model to forecast your perfect job / match, simply a tool for self reflexion.

You could also read the original book by Jung : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_Types. As the article explains, the goal is to understand the various complexes that an individual will develop if he becomes over-reliant to some functions and repress their opposite in their subcouscious. Think about an overly-logical nerd unable to take action, a social butterfly with no introspection, or a tyranical boss with an substance-based stress management technique. Pay special attention to those you judge.

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#293

Post by Retric »

bjoli wrote: post #274
Retric wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raw IQ scores aren’t very stable over time. At 90+ peoples raw scores have dropped significantly vs age 30. Trauma, Alcoholism, and other diseases can also lower scores dramatically. You can correlate adult IQ’s with tests taken by 2 year olds, but the individual raw scores again vary significantly. It seems stable because of how age is adjusting for and the huge sweet spot where 64.2% of the population is grouped be…

First of all, scores are normalized to age (you never compare 90 to 30 years olds. Only 90 to 90-ish year olds). No serious IQ test claim to measure much more than 2 standard deviations up and down (meaning they all break down somewhere above 130-135 or below 70). I have done WISC/WAIS three times (as a part of a psychological assessment) and the conversion to IQ scores were within 3 points (the WAIS/WISC scale measu…

Yes, the score is computed relative to other 90 year olds, however people’s individual cognitive decline is heavily influenced by heath and behavior so individuals can move up or down significantly on a that relative scale. Thus the computed score at 3 doesn’t accurately predict someone’s score at 90 nearly as well as a test taken at 30 predicts someone’s score at 40.

The issue with the underlying raw score at 90+ is it doesn’t map very well to a bell curve. Many people are quite healthy but a significant number are drastically reduced from their younger self.

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#294

Post by phreeza »

jbay808 wrote: post #282
phreeza wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 orderin…

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). "

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#295

Post by Bakary »

0x737368 wrote: post #271
Bakary wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Essentially, the problem with Peterson is that it's a boring rehash. It's a bit frustrating to see the guy defended along the lines of him being a victim of censorship and close-mindedness, when in fact the issue is the lack of content. This is a widespread problem in the YouTube era, where debate confrontations are inherently more popular and financially rewarding for their participants. His ideas on Christianity an…

Whilst I am willing to concede that his approach and ideas might not be novel, it is his fantastic delivery of lectures and connecting different phenomena in a network to explain/support a concept is what draws me to his stuff. As a counterpoint, I really like Campbell's a Hero with a Thousand Faces, but darn if his book isn't hard to read. I think it's a fair argument against him, but it is not Campbell or Evola who…

He is captivating to a certain audience, but so are televangelists. That's the whole crux of the problem. If you recognize it as being entertainment and an aesthetic/subculture, that's fine. But Peterson is presented as a leading thinker to people, which is a problem. Despite what I've written, Peterson isn't even someone I'm specifically interested in, it's more about the underlying issue of which he is a prominent example.

Consider the following: during the Žižek debate, it became clear that not only was the Communist Manifesto the only Marxist text he had read, but he could not accurately recall some of its main points. And it's a really short pamphlet! That means that Peterson had expounded at length on Marxism, made it a central point of his critique and philosophical brand, while having almost no knowledge or understanding of it. Even with the most charitable interpretation, that goes way beyond just occasionally making mistakes due to a discursive style.

Imagine a charismatic professor with a large audience and who has talked at length about the worth of various programming concepts. Now imagine that it turns out the professor can't pass Fizz Buzz. Following that, his fans defend him by saying that he's a captivating explainer who is only sometimes wrong, and that the size of his audience and fantastic delivery is proof of his worth as a leading expert on computer science and programming. Wouldn't that set off alarm bells in your mind?

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#296

Post by NoOneNew »

mancerayder wrote: post #256
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…

>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. Not a Jungian, but the "wrong" claim is a bold one, in reference to Jung's theories. Are they even falsifiable ? Psychology isn't a hard science. For example, how could you falsify something like the idea of archetypes?

Not trying to be an ass, but i think "hard science" is a bad term. Psychology is a young, very complex science. Real psychology really started with Freud, and yes he was inaccurate. Way better than the understanding of human behavior at the time (wandering womb, look it up), way off the mark these days. We're talking about less than 100 years of real research in the field. Electricity, physics, chemistry and even modern atomic theory (1803) have plenty more time in comparison. Freud had to escape the Nazis, just so you have a general timeline. We dont look back to the 1800s at all the cats that made atomic models and go, "what a bunch of fuck ups". They were building up on knowledge. In some respects, they weren't necessarily wrong, just insufficient.

I dont understand the pop culture enjoyment of trashing psychology turn. Every real psychologist in practice and in research are the first to admit how little we know, how incredibly complex it is (meaning we still dont even know all the moving parts involved) and the fact we are still at the starting line. The fact is, we're trying to understand the human mind with millions of broken examples. Learning to rebuild a car using old, junk, crashed, broken, pillaged and uncooperatively hostile junkyard cars isnt an easy feat especially if you dont know what a functional car looks like.

Though, Myers Briggs was just a cash grab with some cliff notes on Jung. Its an intelligentsia zodiac horoscope. Cute, fun, dont take it seriously.

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#297

Post by fsloth »

nicoburns wrote: post #291
fsloth wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of good fiction feels profound. Good fiction feels right and true. But feeling right does not turn the fiction into science.

Sure, but neither does a lack of evidence mean that something isn't true. It's not science currently. But that doesn't mean it won't be (nor does it mean it will be). I think you'd be surprised at how many scientific breakthroughs have come from individuals being bloody minded about things that everyone else thought were ridiculous. Science isn't just about testing hypothesis. The other part of it is about generating…

The main issue I have with Jungian analysis is that it takes Jungs ideas as given and then implements no work to test or validate them. Any authoritarian system that does not evolve is more like religious or political dogma than science.

The difference between Jung and for example Alfred Wegener who was one of the early proponents of plate tectonics is that Wegener's ideas were validated.

"Lots of strange ideas have been true" is not incorrect, but I think there are a lot more strange incorrect ideas out there than correct ones.

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#298

Post by singingfish »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #170
enkid wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

We do know what it measures and we do know what impact it has on real life scenarios.

To some extent, yes. But I think it's better to emphasise the fact that we're ignorant rather than what we know because people really like abusing IQ test results.

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#299

Post by Bodell »

mancerayder wrote: post #261
Bodell wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jordan Peterson is a great example of the failing of Psychology in the academic world. I'll list some quotes by him below and you can decided weather or not he should be listened to, or if he is simply selling right wing propaganda on Youtube. "If men are pushed too hard to feminize they will become more and more interested in harsh, fascist political ideology." "the current hierarchy might be predicated on competenc…

>Most of this can be found on YouTube or his Wikipedia page. Not a Peterson acolyte, a Jungian, or even right wing for that matter, but I'm a political philosophy junkie so I have some familiarity with Peterson's claims, mostly from watching debates and listening to arguments. And I will say this, your random out of context quoting, and hiding behind "check his Wikipedia page and YouTube yourself" is the same sophist…

I do not believe I mentioned a single thing that you are talking about in your comment. I'm not entirely sure what you are talking about in your comment. You seem to have quite the bone to pick with postmodernism, something I left completely left unaddressed about Peterson.

I only implied that saying men will become fascists if they are feminized is ludicrous. Does "postmodernism" mean feminizing men? And I suggest that the idea of men having rightfully taken their god given place higher up the hierarchy of society, is Calvinistic, by definition this is true. Is this what you think is "western superiority"? because I don't think I've ever said those two words together in my life. I also don't think I quoted out of context. Though it seems you feel the context reaches as far back as the enlightenment, in this way I have not given a history of the world before judging Peterson's arguments as something that should be met with skepticism.

I really do mean to go check it out for yourself. All the quotes I grabbed were from the Wikipedia page, I have not hidden anything. I've seen very little of what Peterson has to say, but all of it strikes me as very crackpot like. If I were a professor and publishing psychology papers I do agree my "citations" would not be up to snuff. But I am not either of those things and was not attempting to cite him in that manner. I think there should be more proof to the legitimacy of Peterson being a scientist rather than my HN comment needing more proof that he is not.

Re: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

#300

Post by dang »

dyno-might wrote: post #173

Hi, I'm the author of this post. Any way we can change the link to here: https://dynomight.net/in-defense-of-myers-briggs.html ? This is a slightly updated version of the post (new links, slightly less unhinged language, and a link to this MBTI quiz that I made to promote non-binary axes: https://dynomight.net/mbti )

Sure—changed from https://dynomight.home.blog/2020/06/12/in-defense-of-meyers-.... Thanks!
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